Host www.coremud.org, port 4000
Website http://www.coremud.org/
I was suffering Wayfar1444 withdrawl yesterday and reflecting how awesome a mud with actual space colonization would be, so banged "space colonization mud" into google and this was the first thing that came up and I played it for a couple of hours yesterday.
As a game its pretty damn unique. Its set on a mining colony in the distant future in which you play an employee of a ruthless mining company. Various alien and genetically created human races are available from cyborgs to standard humans and even a completely blind alien race (though I went with the vanilla option as I was learning the game).
The game is like a hybrid of a standard combat and questing mud, (though one with an interesting setting), and something based on activity and economy and has a lot of things I've never seen in a mud before. These include actual work with mining shifts you need to sign up for and then clock out to get paid (they're supposed to run on a timer system but when I tried you could mine whenever you wanted), player run shops where you could actually be an employee and get paged when someone needed serving, and a complete crafting system using the ores you bring back from mining.
Mining is also detailed if a little repetitive, you can be a shift foreman and supervise other players, you can drill in different directions, you need to repair your drill and wear air filters etc. there is even a VI alternative to the ascii mining map too.
Combat is fairly basic, but on the other hand is interesting because its slower and less real time, and has a full body damage system as well as weapons ranging from guns to energy knives, you can also do a few fun things like process the corpses you find at a medical clinic for credits or extra ore, so it pays to carry them around.
Two things which are particularly cool, are the way skills, levels and experience work. You can get better at skills by using them, but you can also pay experience or credits to advance a particular skill, though you can only advance a skill so far before needing to level up. You can also raise your initial stats with experience too, this means levelling is entirely voluntary and done in what areas you want.
Then there are ranks. You begin as rank c in the three professions miner, merc and tech and can advance to rank B in all of them by using killing, mining or repairing skills. At later levels however you can choose to specialise and be rank A in one area. This means you can advance your skills in that area a little higher, but still get access to all other skills which is pretty cool.
There are only two miner access issues. The first is that there is a tripple triad minigame as a card game, and that just doesn't work in text display. The second, is I wish the skills/score interface could be in slightly less unfriendly columns, though these are niggles at most.
Then there are quests. The game has some of the most logical and easy to do quests I've seen, and yet ones which are based entirely on the system, rather than auto generated kill quests or the like, indeed a lot of quests you can find and complete by just wandering around.
There are a few things I haven't found, such as what farming and smelting skills are for and some activities I haven't tried, but this one is pretty unique in terms of muds.
There is only one really seriously major problem. The game has no players.
There was a lot of news and a lot of detail about the game up until the start of 2017, after which however there is literally nothing. Indeed there is such an odd cutoff I actually wonder if the chief developer got ill something, since up until that point updates and work on the game seems pretty frequent. I also sadly haven't seen anyone else on which is extremely since as I said in this post the game is pretty unique.
I even tried to email the chief implementer, but the contact form on the page has a captcha with a none working audio alternative making it literally impossible, judging by his blog he's still around, although he hasn't talked about Coremud recently.
I'll be checking in to see if I can catch someone online, and if anyone wants to join me in investigating what there is of the game (and there is quite a lott), feel free.
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.)
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