Meat MUD Classic

Castle Dracula is now officially completed.  You can reach Castle Dracula by heading east from Midgaard, north toward Moria, east before you reach the entrance to Moria, then north and east through the dwarf forest (head north past the waterfall, then east).  You will eventually reach the entrance to the Carpathian mountains, which should be your first indication that you are getting close.

Castle Dracula may seem impossible to enter, but it's not - just look for some clues to find a secret way in.  As I start developing for a 2.0 release, most likely this will feature a portion of a quest to become a "true" vampire, as opposed to infected with vampirism.

As you may have already noticed - the front page with an embedded client for Meat MUD Classic has returned.  The purpose of this is to enable ease-of-use for new players.  Please let me know if you experience problems connecting this way.

With some effort, the Castle Welmar zone has been imported from CircleMUD into Meat MUD Classic.  Meat MUD oldtimers will remember this as one of the more popular areas for players looking to gain experience during their climb to level 51.

Castle Welmar has been returned to its original location east of Midgaard, with the King's Road beginning on the eastern side of the holy grove.

The Ranger's Guild has been relocated from the eastern side of the holy grove to the north-western corner, and is still accessible.

Castle Welmar is a great area for levels 5-20, and also boasts not just one but two high-level targets (King Welmar and a newcomer) for characters in the 35-50 level range.  Also...try not to touch the zombies.  They carry the plague.

For those of you who are old-timers from the original Meat MUD, one of the missing areas that was part of Meat MUD but was not included with the Envy MUD code (from which Meat MUD Classic is based) is Rome.

Rome is an excellent area for a wide range of players, there are low level mobiles for new players to fight, and there are also mobiles for mid-range and high level characters.  There is also some great equipment and items to be found, the most valuable of which is worn by the Roman gods and goddesses.

Some of you may have noted a certain lack of updates here and also on the MUD.  This is primarily due to a lack of available free time on my part to devote to this project.  That may change in the not too distant future, but a factor in this process is that I can't do it all by myself.  I need help in the form of builders and/or coders.

I hope everyone is having a Happy Holiday season and isn't too badly affected by the economy.  Feel free to contact me by e-mail (click Yaddoshi, then click Contact) if you have any questions or if you are interested in contributing toward Meat's development.

Due to Adobe requiring a special permission tool running on a certain port for the FMud telnet app to connect to Meat MUD, and due to the tool repeatedly freezing, resulting in no connections being possible without a server reset, and due to the frequency of this occuring, I have disabled the FMud client for the time being.

You may still access the MUD directly using our Java based JamochaMUD Client in the meantime.

Please contact me immediately if you experience any problems with this.

Most likely you've already noticed there is a brand new landing page here - and we also have some additional functionality such as a WYSIWYG editor to submit content, in addition to a wider layout, Forums to replace the mostly unused Chatblock, and so forth.

My intention behind the landing page was to provide easy immediate access to the MUD in the hope that perhaps completely new players who are not power-users with their computer would feel less intimidated by the idea of MUDs and give Meat a try.  We also now have a slogan which I feel helps validate the name of our game - "We are no easy meat..."

I also made an effort to enable quick links to navigate the rest of our website, and specifically set them up to open in a new window so as to prevent disconnects from the game (if you leave the page with the FMud flash client, your character gets disconnected automatically).  I'm hoping the text on the left will be easy to understand as well - feel free to critique that if you wish.

So if you have some friends who have gotten tired of the typical graphical MMORPGs and their endless demands for money whether in the form of a subscription fee or in micropayments, which in turn inspire players to spend ridiculous amounts of time in said MMORPGs to justify their financial investment, let em know about us.  Who knows - maybe they'll see the beauty of a MMO without all the fancy graphics to distract from the fun of the game.

Castle Dracula is not quite finished yet. There are certain mob and object placements I have not decided upon, but the area is functional enough at this point that I figured certain players may be interested in checking it out.

However - it is not for the faint of heart. Outside the castle area is for levels 25+, inside the castle levels 35+ (average of 30). I recommend exploring in groups because most monsters are aggressive, and can detect invisible or sneaking characters. I purposely made the area this difficult because there is a lack of high-level areas available in the game.

Please find bugs and/or provide feedback - those who do so will be rewarded.

As you've undoubtedly noticed, the Meat MUD Classic website has been relocated and given a bit of an overhaul. The downside is that all images in previous posts have been lost.

The upside is that we now have a new chat box, avatars, and some additional added functionality that was not possible before. We also have a new layout that I feel is a better theme for a D&D based MUD. There are still some bugs and things that need to be set up properly before I am finished here. I also plan on setting up forums. The biggest benefit (which affects me more than you) is that any time a security update is released for Drupal, I can apply it to the 5 websites I am hosting simultaneously in roughly 15 minutes, as opposed to 15 minutes per site (1 hour & 15 minutes altogether). This of course helps prevent us from getting hacked, not that I expect it will stop anyone who is really serious about taking over.

Anyway, I apologize to anyone who lost their avatar picture here, but in the interest of consistency I am setting a requirement to use one of the avatars I have uploaded. Hopefully you will find there are plenty to choose from. Those of you who are artsy and wish to modify one of the ones available - go right ahead, and e-mail me with any new ones you create.

Yet another "feature" I don't remember from the original Meat MUD is having to pay gold to learn and practice skills and spells with your guildmaster.  Consequently the gold requirement has been removed entirely, and you may practice your spells and skills with...(wait for it)...practices!

I eventually intend to allow Heros (level 60) who cannot obtain additional practices through gameplay to be able to practice for gold, but that will take more time than it did to disable the requirement - so don't expect that to come immediately.

As always, please feel free to comment or contact me if you do not like this change.