2015-11-27 21:47:13 (edited by Mirage 2022-06-27 07:07:28)

There have been several topics about which Muds are best for cooking, crafting, farming, and exploration.  After playing a lot of Muds in search of the best one, I thought I would cull my knowledge and start this list, in hopes that I can save others a lot of time and searching. I hope everyone will add their advice, thoughts, and opinions to this thread, so that we can make a bigger list, but these Muds will get you started if you’re interested in any of the nonviolent facets of Mudding.
See Post 39 for additional information about some of the Muds.
See post 80 for information about Flexible Survival, an adult-themed mud with lots of crafting.
See post 84 for info on Accursed Lands, some of the best crafting I've discovered.

Accursed Lands

Build and furnish your homes, completely from crafting. Cook. Forge weapons. Weave and tailor clothing. But prepare to spend time developing the skills, and be aware that you may have to use several skills to craft an item. That's what makes this Mud so intriguing from a crafter's standpoint.
Cooking is also an interesting process, since you may need to hunt for meat, skin it, butcher it, and hhen cook. You may also need to buy items from shops in order to create other recipes.
Exploration is fantastic.
The only thing I didn't see in this one was farming.
Host: mud.accursed-lands.com
Port: 8000
Websites: Accursed Lands Wiki
Note that this Wiki is worded in the past tense, but the Mud is up and running smoothly.
Accursed Lands Topic by Annellin

Avalon

This Mud has everything – exquisitely written descriptions, friendly player base, navigation helps like zoom and find to make exploration easier, extensive crafting system, cooking, and farming.  The only caution is that it takes a significant amount of RL time to raise your skills up enough to get into the crafting, and it can be costly resourcewise to get started in game.  If you’re interested in farming, in the beginning, you probably won’t have enough gold to buy your own plough, so you’ll need to help out your city in farming their fields.  This is fine, but it does mean you’ll have to be online at the time when the ploughing occurs. This mud is well worth the payoff if you’re patient, but this isn’t a Mud that you can start, and be making furniture two days later.

Host: Avalon-rpg.com
Port: 23
Website: Avalon

CoffeeMud

I’m surprised this Mud doesn’t have more people on it, because it has amazing crafting!  If this is your main interest, the important thing here is to choose apprentice for your starting class, then choose artisan, and you’ll learn new crafting abilities as you level. If I had to guess, I would say this Mud offers the most crafting opportunities of any one out there – many levels of cooking, baking, embroidery, engraving, carpentry, ship building, jewelry making, tailoring, weaponsmithing, and amorsmithing, just to name a few. You can begin crafting early on this one too, you just have to know where to look to find the necessary resources for each of your projects. The only downside is that with so few players on at any time, and some of those idle, it can be hard to get newbie questions answered. But the players are friendly.

Host: coffeemud.net
Port: 23
Website: CoffeeMud

7th Plane

This Mud is set up a bit differently than the majority of RPG's. You don't go to mudschool, or train your skills. You learn by doing. This means that you start using your crafting skills, of which there are many, from the very beginning. Start by using "gather" and "chop" to gain resources, and work your way up from there. The first few times you use a skill, it will not work, but don't let that deter you. You don't choose a class until you want to, so you are free to spend time learning about the different ones and how they might affect your game.
These differences make for a refreshing experience as Muds go, and a fun game!

host: 7thplane.net
port: 8888
website: http://www.7thplane.net/

Lament: Age of Wind and Wolves

Lament offers - cooking, pottery, sewing, herbology, leatherworking, and many more.
The most unique feature of Lament is the job system.  If you go to an inn or any of the buildings and type "Apply", you'll see that you can apply for certain jobs that fit your skills and level.  These jobs will allow you to earn money, and possibly skill increases, when you are logged off of the game. This means you don't have to starve because you can't find quests for gold, the way you might in other Muds.  I love this idea, and wish other developers would implement it in their Muds.
Another personal favorite feature that seems to be unique to Lament is one of the races.  Menhits are half-otter half-hobbits. Considering the creativity that I've seen so far in only an hour of play, I imagine the crafting will be great in this one.

Host: lament.ghostglass.net
port: 8600

Frandum

contributed by Dark
Frandom has carpentry, weaving, knitting, skinning, tanning and leather working, smithing, forging, brewing, and their working on cooking, all of which you can start off right at the beginning, indeed in Frandom since you learn by doing (although teaching is available from some npcs), you can begin crafting whenever you want, and do whatever crafts you want at any time, though of course they'll get better with practice, (just as do all the skills in Frandom).
What is unique in Frandom however, is that rather than crafting involving gathering a pre existing set of resources to turn into crafted objects, you can literally pick up anything and try to make something of it.
For example, if you walk into an inn and find a bed with a colourful woolen blanket, you can get out your knitting needles and knit it into a colourful woolen scarf.
Can't think of anything to do with that old stick you just took off a goblin? Why not try sawing it into a drinking cup.
As well as getting some experience and earning you a quest whenever you try out a new craft, one major advantage to crafting in Frandum (aside from the direct benefits of say potions you brew or clothes and armor you make), is making cash.
The more you craft, the better items you create and the more you can sell them for, and since as I said Frandom is one game where you can't just slay your way to solvency, this is a major benefit. While it doesn't have a huge player base, people tend to be very friendly, including the staff, indeed one nice thing in Frandom is that the staff will help you enough to discover quests and new crafts and such, but not do them for you, since the game is all about exploring. Frandom is probably the only mud I know that does not directly award you for killing creatures in combat (all advancement is by quests, puzzles, examining things, trying things out ,  and exploring the world), exploratory crafting goes right along with this too, indeed while Frandom does have combat and weapons and such, it's probably the least combat heavy mud I've seen and absolutely perfect if your sick of constant kill and grind fests.

Host: frandom.fr
port 2001.
Website: www.Frandom.fr

Cosmic rage

The most impressive thing about this science-fiction-themed Mud is the colossal amount of customization you get from level 1! Rent a dwelling on any planet, and build rooms to your heart’s content. Describe the rooms, add more as your bank account grows. This is the only Mud I can think of, where you get so much creative space to build a house of your own.
There have been a lot of improvements in farming. Grow your own crops, raise livestock, send produce to the market, and keep track of it all from your farmland. You need to check the farm daily, to be sure your animals have enough feed, crops are watered, etc.
Cooking and sewing are great systems. Buy a sewing machine, and create exactly the clothing you want, if you can’t find it in the countless shops around the planets. Buy ingredients, and create your own recipes in the kitchen.
Make quilts, hunt, build homes from the ground up, perform concerts, make videos to contribute to the in-game television channels, create and sell paintings, write books, and make weapons and armor.
You can also create things for pets and babies. While the pets and babies are donator items, (meaning they cost money), they are a big draw to this game, because they are so fully customizable.
When you reach level 200, you can build your own factory. Open shops and cafes. Choose a theme for the factory and describe all of its rooms. Gather over 200 blueprints from space, to build furniture, appliances, and much more, that you can sell in your shops.
Another of my favorite features on Cosmic Rage, is that your suggestions are taken seriously, and implemented quickly if approved. Updates are made daily, and the game just keeps getting better.

Host: cosmicrage.earth
Port: 7777

3 Kingdoms/ 3 scapes

contributed by Dark

3k.org port 3000, 3scapes.org 3200.

I've only just started on this one so haven't looked things over as extensively as I might've done so far.
The games are pretty involved in a lot of areas and fairly obscure, from their guilds to their combat, however both involve a pretty extensive crafting system which includes cooking, farming, mining, chaos wrangling (aka making gems out of the energy of monsters), and of course smithing.
All of these sound like quite involved crafts, indeed farming is apparently quite a puzzler.

Empire Mud

This one is unique for your ability to build buildings fairly easily. Suggested by Firefly82.

host: empiremud.net
port: 4000
Website: EmpireMud

Iron Realms Muds

These Muds boast huge worlds, complex economy and political systems, tons of crafting etc. I didn't mention specific ones, because all seven or eight Muds are like this. The only downside is that they are roleplay intensive, so that if you say one thing out of character, people look at you like you're crazy. But they are immersive and wonderful worlds, so if you like roleplay, these are for you.

Website: Iron Realms Entertainment

4dimensions

4Dimensions.org port 6000.
Okay, this one I suspect Mirage knows about since she mentioned it earlier, but as I'm just trying it myself here is what I know.
While not quite as profoundly quest orientated as Frandom, 4dimensions is very heavy on doing quests, looking at objects, finding things. As such there are several professions and occupations you can try as a crafter.
These include various ways of acquiring resources such as fruit, wood, meat, skins, gems, etc and turning them into finished items. What is unique in 4dimensions as opposed to other games, is that the crafting actually rewards you with different things like trade points, indeed judging by several updates to the game it seems that this is an aspect of things the admins are trying to promote further, (textile working, which includes crafts as diverse as sale and rope making, tailoring and weaving has just been added).

Alteraeon

alteraeon.com port 310.
website here and audiogames.net db page here
But why alteraeon I here you all cry. We know alteraeon, it's all about the combat and the questing, where is there any crafting?
The answer is, well firstly what do you mean by crafting?
Lots of games have item enchanting it is true, but many of alteraeon's abilities are going way beyond your usual rpg style "just cast enchant armour to get a few extra armour class on an item" type of affairs that one would expect.
These include rune crafting, various protective spells, staff making, and my personal favorite the by now very extensive amount of brewable items, which range from the druids salves and protective tinctures, to the rather mad alchemist style mage potion brewing, and the dastardly world of poisons.
though these are combat abilities, they do involve a lot of gathering, and indeed knowing what to gather as well as recipes and carrying ingredients.
there are then a host of options for making your own weapons and armor, and while we don't have smithing yet, the ability to grab a branch and carve it into something good certainly is around for several classes.
More recently, some very basic, class free crafting options have been added. These include leather working, the chance to make armour through the skins of vanquished foes, stone tool knapping, and cooking is in the works.
yes, all of these abilities relate to combat, however when your spending as much of your time and attention making your staves or gathering herbs to put in potions, or poisoning your weaponry, I don't know what else to call it but! crafting.
As a final note, I did observe that star conquest has crafting, but I've not enough experience in that game to really say much about it.
Erion also has potion brewing, though in that case I don't know if the options to brew is extensive enough to count as actual crafting as opposed to just an interesting way to generate combat buffs.

Other Muds to Try

Procedural Realms (highly recommend)
Lensmoor
Wayfar 1444
CoreMud
Ancient Anguish
Flexible Survival - adult themed

2015-11-27 23:32:07

I will recommend adding Wayfar1444 to this list.

wayfar1444.com port: 7777

The game is a scifi one rather than fantasy, with you setting up a colony on an alien planet. However, don't let that fool you, everything in the game needs to be built, from campfires, to drinkable water, to food, weapons to energy and mineral collectors, buildings for your colony, vehicles, robots and spaceships, heck you even need to make some of the different sorts of tools you will need for other crafts.

Most of the crafts have sub components, for example to build a building you will need to use chunks of iron ore to make iron bars, or iron sheeting, make a concrete base, the building's power core (which takes collected energy and circuitry), etc.
Sinse different craft projects use different tools, this means crafts can get very! complex, indeed you will find you need to quickly get used to using your datapad in the game to lookup craft requirements.

There isn't particularly a separation of professions or of crafts. You can harvest and gather plant matter just as easily as you can rocks and ores, it's just a matter of picking the right extraction tool.

I will say the help system is a wee bit lacking, and when I was on there werent' a lot of players, although people (including the game's creator), were fine about answering questions, and the game has some great help commands, for example examining any item will let you know what commands to use on it, and the datapad will tell you how to craft.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2015-11-28 17:56:06

I think the Empire-mud could be also interesting. You spend a lot of time building up your empire crafting food, weapons, furniture, clothes and other usefull stuff.

2015-11-29 19:22:39

Hi Mirage.

Perhaps you could copy the list from your first post (just go to edit post, then select all and copy), add some website for the muds that have them and then post a spruced up version in the articles room?
The website for Wayfar1444 is http://wayfar1444.com/

I've also had a look in This topic and a couple of crafting muds are mentioned, in particular one called 7th plane, though I've not played it.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2015-11-29 20:06:35 (edited by Mirage 2015-11-29 20:36:05)

Good idea!
I'll work on adding the websites, and peruse the threads to see if there are other Muds to add. Maybe I should give this thread a week or so, to see if others have suggestions, and then make a big post for the articles room.
It would be great if somebody created a thread like this for the best combat Muds.  While combat isn't my thing, I would be interested to see the comparison of Muds, and learn what others think makes a great combat Mud.

2015-11-29 22:23:08 (edited by Mirage 2015-11-29 22:43:25)

A few lesser-mentioned Muds to check out for anyone who is interested:
7th plane
New Moon
Procedural Realms - This one is new and looks like it's still in development phase. I left them some feedback suggesting an option for turning off ansi color and the map. If others do the same, this one might turn out to be great, because the Mud description said "nearly everything is craftable."
The Inquisition

2015-11-30 00:37:44

Mirage

I sent you a private email using the link under your name with some other suggestions you might be interested in.

2015-11-30 02:30:48

I just looked in my in-box and it's not there.
It says my inbox is empty.
Any thoughts from the moderators?

2015-11-30 07:00:01

I'm of the impression that when you send an email using the email link, it goes to whtever email address you set up in your profile.

2015-12-01 00:07:59

@Mektastic,

I finally got your EMail.  I guess they're putting things in my junk folder instead of my inbox now.
I replied to you, but I just got a notice saying the message was undeliverable.

2015-12-01 12:41:54

e-mail and private messages are two different things.
e-mail the forum sends an e-mail to the person's address, and theoretically someone should be able to just reply to send an e-mail back.

Private messages are just on the forum itself, however Mektastic, while your free to send suggestions privately, why not put them here in this topic? After all you! will be in a far better position to explain about muds you know or have tried than Mirage would be paraphrasing you, especially if your discussing muds she hasn't played herself (believe me, I know a lot about trying to describe games you haven't played, one reason I always try to have a quick go with any game, or at least listen to a podcast demo before I write a db entry).

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2015-12-01 16:53:00

The majority of your best crafting muds will be RP oriented. The balance of crafting helps, in theory,  to drive the player economy. In practice it is usually badly balanced, but eh.

Anyway. The best mud for crafting, exploring, etc that comes to mind is Lament. It has no player base at the moment, but the setup is very interesting. Rooms are large and take time to move through. Items hold positions throughout rooms. YOu can get ambushed by wolves in the wilderness. Skills go up through use. All the usual good stuff. Eating and drinking is required to survive,a nd there are getables. IE, if you are in a field, you can get grass, and continue to pull an endless supply of it out of the ground. Then weave that into a basket or whatever.

The connection info is: lament.ghostglass.net Port: 8600

2015-12-02 07:27:59

really nice to have such info.

2015-12-02 11:23:03

Thank you.
I'm glad there's interest in the thread.

2015-12-02 19:20:34

Wow! I gave Lament a try, and it is awesome! Also the few players there value rp, but they are creative enough to make a story from almost anything you come with. And yeah, the crafting thing is really vast and the best thing is that the game is still on going, which means we can actively contribute with feedback. They even have a screen reader mode to toggle...
Best regards, Haramir.

The true blind is the one who refuses to see.

2015-12-02 22:05:52 (edited by Mirage 2015-12-02 22:20:58)

For anyone who plays Lament, let me know if you have a problem closing VipMud after you play. I've played twice now, and when I'm through, I can't alt-f4 out of VipMud afterwords. I don't have this problem in any other Mud. Just curious if it's a glitch here, or something with the game.

I would also add that I've just checked out 7th Plane, and it is amazing for crafting from the very beginning. It's set up a bit differently than most Muds, but once you figure it out, it's nonstop crafting!

I am slowly working my way through suggestions on this thread and others, trying to know a little about the game before I add it to the list at the top of the thread.  If you don't see your suggestion yet, just know it will be there soon.

2015-12-03 13:14:12

This is a great list Mirage.
Might I suggest when you've added in some suggestions like Lament and 7th plane, and maybe written a little more, you use the "edit post" function, and copy it to the articles room so that it's easier to find in the future, thumbs up from me.

Btw, according to their wiki and the newbie tutorial, discworld mud also has lots of crafting from blacksmithing, to potion making to making jewelery.

I don't however really know how it works in the game, sinse to be honest I got a little annoyed with discworld, as though I finished the tutorial village which was great, I moved into the game propper and was literally wandering around with nothing to do.
The descriptions were amazing, especially for fans of the discworld books, but there were no quests, no objects to craft, the only activity I found was scavaging the streets for money and that didn't do much sinse I had no idea what the money was for. I did ask other players, but nobody particularly had any suggestions, everyone just went on about "the start being difficult" without pointing me in any direction, indeed it sort of peed me off that I'd go and see important people from the discworld books like corporal Knobs, and yet they'd just stand there and I couldn't interact with them or really do anything, much less get into crafting or combat or anything else.

Still, to get back to the point, there is! apparently lots of crafting in the game, if one can find it.

I'm afraid I don't recall the connection info, but the website for Discworld mud is Here and you can check the wiki (which also has some great screen reader information).
I'm sure there is a good game in there somewhere, and likely some good crafting too, especially considering that one of the character classes is witch (of either gender), and some of the priest classes need to sacrifice objects to their gods, however as I said I found the thing a bit impenitrable, though I've heard glowing reports from others.

Oh, and btw, the main complaint I've heard about discworld, that it's huge and nearly impossible to navigate around I didn't find the case at all. The descriptions of Anke Morpork were more than adequate to let me know where I was, eg, you are at the south end of such and such street where it turns into so and so square, and there are some great text overviews on the wiki. It was just the game itself! I found a wee bit hard to get into.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2015-12-04 00:36:15

Hi Dark,

I will add this list to the articles room.  Right now, I'm just trying to play some of the Muds I didn't know about, so I can write about them in a better way.  My plan is to wait til this weekend to see if we get any more suggestions. Then early next week, I'll take the list of Muds that we have, and try to write up the top post with a bit more information on each Mud, or at the very least, make myself a little more eloquent.  When all that's done, I'll copy this over to the articles room.  Thanks for the feedback and encouragement.

I found out that 4dimensions is adding crafting to their Mud, so I started playing it again.
I'm also going to give DiscWorld another go.
I'm surprised!  When I started this, I expected to have five or six Muds tops, and now it's looking like we'll have ten or twelve!

To Everyone,
If you have any more suggestions for good Muds for crafting, farming, cooking, or exploring, let me know.  Our list is really growing, and I thank you all for the contributions so far.

2015-12-04 01:28:51

Cool!

Clok and Avalon you already know plenty about, if you need any more info on Wayfar144 feel free to ask, other than that I'm interested to see what people come up with myself.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2015-12-11 10:02:58

What do yu all think?
Dark Legacy is still up, but I read that it's been abandoned by the developers.  It has an incredibly detailed website, as if there's a lot to it, and I bought a sextant so I could use coordinates for getting around.  But when you get out of the newbie academy and into the towns, there are very few room descriptions. It says "want to help, submit a description" in so many of the rooms!  So that makes me think the Mud is no longer active.  That's a real shame too, because from the website, it looked fantastic!
So what do you all think?
Should I leave this one on the list or no?

I'm taking so long to set this up as an article, because I'm trying to play these enough that I get a real sense for what they are and are not, that way no one is disappointed.

I found another great-sounding one last night, called Seven Kingdoms, only to discover that it had been shut down in 2013.

And then, I found a page on Wikipedia about a Mud called Primordiax, and the farming was incredible!  I was so excited . . . til I found out it's no longer in development either.

It may take me years of learning, but I think this is eventually going to come down to the fact that I am going to have to learn coding, and build the Mud I want.

2015-12-11 10:32:21

Guahahaha Mirage, welcome to the tedius world of writing informative game descriptions. Now you know my pain and why I cannot make as many database updates as I would want.

Lament sounds rather fun, I like the idea of jobs.
Personally I'd recommend keeping dark legacy in the list so long as the game is playable, though noting that it is not maintained anymore.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2015-12-11 11:30:32

Heheheheheheh.
I feel your pain, Dark.
It can be disconcerting, trying to figure out exactly what info to include for each description, what's most important to your audience, who your audience even is!
You do a phenomenal job on this site, and I thought that before I even started trying to contribute anything.

Another fun Mud I discovered last night is Storm Hunters.  It's got crafting, but I'm not far enough into it yet to really know much about it.  I do enjoy the way it lets you level though.  It's like Alter Aeon, where you can level all your classes simultaneously.

2015-12-11 12:42:43

Hello folks. It is really a shame that Primordiax got discontinued. I've been talking to Easine, one of the founders of Lament and she's prety open to suggestions on how to make the game more screen reader friendly. We should spread the word and get more people to play the game, for it is lacking peole to roleplay with and trade resources.
Regarding Storm hunters, I've been into it some time ago. It is a fun mud. Almost every area holds a secret item that you must solve a pusle to get the pieces and assemble. Some of them even rewards a different item depending on the order you put the pieces together. It is, though, a game to play with someone else to explore and chat, since the room descriptions are not good enough to keep a solo player entertained for a long time.
Best regards, Haramir.

The true blind is the one who refuses to see.

2015-12-11 18:04:42

I'm surprised that Hell Moo hasn't been mentioned as a candidate for such a list. Subject matter of the mud aside, its crafting system is pretty involved, requiring you to gain experience in various fields in order to make various products ranging from Ghost Busters gear to melee weapons to aircraft. Fair enough that the nature of the mud places it in a niche market of players. That aside, and though I haven't myself played it for a long time, I still feel it's one of the better crafting muds available.

Spill chuck you spots!

2015-12-11 21:39:26 (edited by Mirage 2015-12-11 21:41:08)

I've heard the crafting on Armageddon is good too. I think that one's kind of like HellMoo, isn't it?
I'd like to check them out for the crafting, but the subject matter puts me off.
I'll add HellMoo to the list once I look up the connection info, and Armageddon if I get confirmation of it.