MUD trees

The MUD trees below depict hierarchies of derivation among MUD codebases. Solid lines between boxes indicate code relationships, while dotted lines indicate conceptual relationships. Dotted boxes indicate that the codebase is outside the family depicted.

Note that codebases are different from individual servers, in the same way that a biological family/genus/species is different from a specific bird at a zoo or fossil imprint in a museum. Some of the codebases below are incredibly popular, with many servers based on them; other codebases may only be found on archive sites, making them available but effectively extinct. For a list of specific servers using some of these codebases, see the Chronology of MUDs article.

AberMUD family tree[edit]

AberMUD family tree

MUD1^[1]

MIST^[2]

Lance

Dirt^[3]

Dyrt

idirt

TinyMUD family tree[edit]

Also known as MU*

TinyMUD family tree

Monster^[4]

AberMUD^[5]

TinyMUD 1.41^[6]

TinyMUD 1.52

TinyMUD 1.54

TinyMUCK 1.2^[7]

Islandia

TinyMUSH 1.0^[8]

SMUG

MOO^[7]

TinyMage 1.2

TinyMage 1.2

CoolMUD^[9]

TinyMAZE

FuzzBall MUCK 5.xx

ColdMUD^[9]

TinyMAZE 2.0

FuzzBall MUCK 6.0

GlowMUCK

TinyMAZE 3.0

LPMud family tree[edit]

LPMud family tree

TinyMUD^[10]

AberMUD^[10]

LPMud^[6]

LPMud 2.4.5

UriMUD

LPMud 3.0.0

SWLPC^[11]

DGD^[12]

CD

LPMud 3.1.2

LPC4

LPMud 3.2
(Amylaar)^[13]

MudOS^[13]

µLPC

LDMud

FluffOS

Pike^[14]

DikuMUD family tree[edit]

DikuMUD family tree

AberMUD^[6]

DikuMUD^[15]

SillyMUD^[16]

VieMUD

Circle1^[16]

Diku II

Sequent

Eltanin

Techno

Crimson

DaleMUD

Circle2

Nilgiri

Copper1

Fajita

SneezyMUD

Archipelago

Circle3

LostLands

Copper2

Pirate

tbaMUD

Merc1^[16]

Copper3

Rom1.0^[16]

Merc2

Vego

SocketMUD

Rom2.3

ACK!MUD

Envy1^[16]

SMAUG^[17]

GodWars^[18]

MrMud

NiMud

RocketMUD

NakedMUD

Sunder

Rom2.4

EmberMud

ASSAULT

Envy2

AFKMud

SERF

Dystopia

Emud

EmlenMUD

Anatolia

ROT

Oblivion

Mythran

UltraEnvy

EOS

Dawn of Time

References[edit]

↑ Eddy Carroll. "5. Reviews -- Rest of the World". Archived from the original on 2010-04-23. Retrieved 2013-01-16. Cox was a player of MUD1 who wrote AberMUD while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
↑ Lawrie, Michael (2003). "Escape from the Dungeon". I had also taken over a new game called AberMUD that two of my wizards, Anarchy (Alan Cox) and Moog (Richard Acott) had originally written at Aberyswyth University and Alan was now converting to Unix at Southampton University. Alan ended up taking a year out so I took on AberMUD and roped in a couple of programmers in to help keep the thing maintained and expanded. [...] In 1991, I sent a copy of AberMUD to Vijay Subramaniam and Bill Wisner (our only two American MIST wizards) and as far as MUDs being generally available to the world, the rest is history which oddly isn't true for the credits in AberMUD since a huge amount of the original authors were removed somewhere.
↑ Salte, Alf; Sørseth, Gjermund. "Information and Installation Guide for DIRT 3.1.2". Archived from the original on 2008-09-24. The files doc/CHANGELOG-aber-IV and doc/Manual.ms contain changes and info for the old original code, they are obsolescent and are included for historical reasons only. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
↑ Aspnes, James (1991-04-19). "MUD Info". TinyMUD 1.0 was initially designed as a portable, stripped-down version of Monster (this was back in the days when TinyMUD was designed to be up and running in a week of coding and last for a month before everybody got bored of it.) The basic idea was to include the minimal object-creation and locking features of Monster without throwing in all the hairy stuff. Since then a lot of the hairy stuff has been reinvented. It might be interesting to go back and look at the Monster docs and see how much of its functionality eventually showed up in TinyMUD.
↑ Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. TinyMUD was deliberately intended to be distanced from the prevailing hack-and-slay AberMUD style, and the "D" in its name was said to stand for "Dimension" (or, occasionally, "Domain") rather than "Dungeon;" this is the ultimate cause of the MUD/MU* distinction that was to arise some years later. Search this book on
↑ ^6.0 ^6.1 ^6.2 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 9. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. AberMUD spread across university computer science departments like a virus. Identical copies (or incarnations) appeared on thousands of Unix machines. It went through four versions in rapid succession, spawning several imitators. The three most important of these were TinyMUD, LPMUD and DikuMUD. Search this book on
↑ ^7.0 ^7.1 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 11. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. One player, Stephen White, decided in 1990 to extend the functionality of TinyMUD and write TinyMUCK (muck being a kind of mud). Using this as his template, he then produced MOO (MUD, Object Oriented). Search this book on
↑ Leong, Lydia (1995). "MUSH Manual Version 2.008". MUSH is a derivative of the original TinyMUD.
↑ ^9.0 ^9.1 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 11. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. MOO had two important offspring: Pavel Curtis' LambdaMOO (which was to become a favorite of journalists, academics, and social misfits) and, via CoolMUD, ColdMUD (an attempt to create a software-engineering quality virtual world authoring system). Search this book on
↑ ^10.0 ^10.1 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 10. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. Having played both AberMUD and TinyMUD, he decided he wanted to write his own game with the adventure of the former and the user-extensibility of the latter. Search this book on
↑ Mulligan, Jessica; Patrovsky, Bridgette (2003). Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide. New Riders. pp. 452–453. ISBN 1-59273-000-0. 1990 [...] Shattered World, the first Australian LPMud, opens. "This MUD is the source of a private-distribution LPMud server used by a handful of spin-off MUDs in the US." —George Reese Search this book on
↑ Shah, Rawn; Romine, James (1995). Playing MUDs on the Internet. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 164–165. ISBN 0-471-11633-5. DGD, created by Dworkin aka Felix Croes, is a complete rewrite of the LPmud game. Search this book on
↑ ^13.0 ^13.1 Towers, J. Tarin; Badertscher, Ken; Cunningham, Wayne; Buskirk, Laura (1996). Yahoo! Wild Web Rides. IDG Books Worldwide Inc. p. 141. ISBN 0-7645-7003-X. MudOS and Amylaar:: There are a couple versions of LPmuds that you might run into. More are being developed as coders and wizards improve their games. Both MudOS and Amylaar are descendants of LPmuds, and Amylaar is an especially popular version. Search this book on
↑ "The History of Pike". Pike. Archived from the original on 2010-02-04. Retrieved 2009-09-09. In the beginning, there was Adventure. Then a bunch of people decided to make multi-player adventure games. One of those people was Lars Pensjö at the Chalmers university in Gothenburg, Sweden. For his game he needed a simple, memory-efficient language, and thus LPC (Lars Pensjö C) was born. About a year later Fredrik Hübinette started playing one of these games and found that the language was the most easy-to-use language he had ever encountered. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
↑ Shah, Rawn; Romine, James (1995). Playing MUDs on the Internet. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 22. ISBN 0-471-11633-5. DikuMud first appeared in mid-March of 1990 when a group of programmers at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark got together and began work on a multiplayer game that is similar to but improved on AberMuds. These coders were Hans Henrik Staerfeld, Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Michael Seifert, and Sebastian Hammer. Search this book on
↑ ^16.0 ^16.1 ^16.2 ^16.3 ^16.4 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 10. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. ...several major codebases (standalone MUD program suites) were created from the basic DikuMUD original, the main ones being Circle, Silly, and Merc. Merc spawned ROM (Rivers of MUD) and Envy, among others, and these in turn had their own spinoffs. Search this book on
↑ Cowan, Andrew (2001-09-17). "MUD FAQ Part 4". Internet FAQ Archives. SMAUG: [...] History: The SMAUG code started out as a Merc2.1 MUD called "Realms of Despair" in 1994. It wasn't until 1996 that it was given its name, and the first public release wasn't until December of 1996. The interest in the code spread like wildfire, and within a few months and a few revisions there had been over 20,000 downloads of the distribution.
↑ Koster, Raph. "Online World Timeline". GodWars, a Merc derivative codebase, is released unofficially

External links[edit]

The Dikumud Family Tree from the official DikuMUD site.
A Classification of MUDs by Martin Keegan
Another version of the mud family tree.
MUD Genealogy Project is a very complete version of mud family tree.
The History of Pike

This article "MUD trees" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:MUD trees. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

[carroll-cox-1] Eddy Carroll. "5. Reviews -- Rest of the World". Archived from the original on 2010-04-23. Retrieved 2013-01-16. Cox was a player of MUD1 who wrote AberMUD while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)

[lawrie-dungeon-2] Lawrie, Michael (2003). "Escape from the Dungeon". I had also taken over a new game called AberMUD that two of my wizards, Anarchy (Alan Cox) and Moog (Richard Acott) had originally written at Aberyswyth University and Alan was now converting to Unix at Southampton University. Alan ended up taking a year out so I took on AberMUD and roped in a couple of programmers in to help keep the thing maintained and expanded. [...] In 1991, I sent a copy of AberMUD to Vijay Subramaniam and Bill Wisner (our only two American MIST wizards) and as far as MUDs being generally available to the world, the rest is history which oddly isn't true for the credits in AberMUD since a huge amount of the original authors were removed somewhere.

[saltesorseth-3] Salte, Alf; Sørseth, Gjermund. "Information and Installation Guide for DIRT 3.1.2". Archived from the original on 2008-09-24. The files doc/CHANGELOG-aber-IV and doc/Manual.ms contain changes and info for the old original code, they are obsolescent and are included for historical reasons only. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)

[Monster-4] Aspnes, James (1991-04-19). "MUD Info". TinyMUD 1.0 was initially designed as a portable, stripped-down version of Monster (this was back in the days when TinyMUD was designed to be up and running in a week of coding and last for a month before everybody got bored of it.) The basic idea was to include the minimal object-creation and locking features of Monster without throwing in all the hairy stuff. Since then a lot of the hairy stuff has been reinvented. It might be interesting to go back and look at the Monster docs and see how much of its functionality eventually showed up in TinyMUD.

[dvw-5] Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 741. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. TinyMUD was deliberately intended to be distanced from the prevailing hack-and-slay AberMUD style, and the "D" in its name was said to stand for "Dimension" (or, occasionally, "Domain") rather than "Dungeon;" this is the ultimate cause of the MUD/MU* distinction that was to arise some years later. Search this book on

[AberMUDs-6] 6.0 ^6.1 ^6.2 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 9. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. AberMUD spread across university computer science departments like a virus. Identical copies (or incarnations) appeared on thousands of Unix machines. It went through four versions in rapid succession, spawning several imitators. The three most important of these were TinyMUD, LPMUD and DikuMUD. Search this book on

[MUCK-7] 7.0 ^7.1 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 11. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. One player, Stephen White, decided in 1990 to extend the functionality of TinyMUD and write TinyMUCK (muck being a kind of mud). Using this as his template, he then produced MOO (MUD, Object Oriented). Search this book on

[leong-manual-8] Leong, Lydia (1995). "MUSH Manual Version 2.008". MUSH is a derivative of the original TinyMUD.

[MOO-9] 9.0 ^9.1 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 11. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. MOO had two important offspring: Pavel Curtis' LambdaMOO (which was to become a favorite of journalists, academics, and social misfits) and, via CoolMUD, ColdMUD (an attempt to create a software-engineering quality virtual world authoring system). Search this book on

[bartle-lpmud-10] 10.0 ^10.1 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 10. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. Having played both AberMUD and TinyMUD, he decided he wanted to write his own game with the adventure of the former and the user-extensibility of the latter. Search this book on

[dog-11] Mulligan, Jessica; Patrovsky, Bridgette (2003). Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide. New Riders. pp. 452–453. ISBN 1-59273-000-0. 1990 [...] Shattered World, the first Australian LPMud, opens. "This MUD is the source of a private-distribution LPMud server used by a handful of spin-off MUDs in the US." —George Reese Search this book on

[shahromine-12] Shah, Rawn; Romine, James (1995). Playing MUDs on the Internet. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 164–165. ISBN 0-471-11633-5. DGD, created by Dworkin aka Felix Croes, is a complete rewrite of the LPmud game. Search this book on

[ywwr-13] 13.0 ^13.1 Towers, J. Tarin; Badertscher, Ken; Cunningham, Wayne; Buskirk, Laura (1996). Yahoo! Wild Web Rides. IDG Books Worldwide Inc. p. 141. ISBN 0-7645-7003-X. MudOS and Amylaar:: There are a couple versions of LPmuds that you might run into. More are being developed as coders and wizards improve their games. Both MudOS and Amylaar are descendants of LPmuds, and Amylaar is an especially popular version. Search this book on

[pike-14] "The History of Pike". Pike. Archived from the original on 2010-02-04. Retrieved 2009-09-09. In the beginning, there was Adventure. Then a bunch of people decided to make multi-player adventure games. One of those people was Lars Pensjö at the Chalmers university in Gothenburg, Sweden. For his game he needed a simple, memory-efficient language, and thus LPC (Lars Pensjö C) was born. About a year later Fredrik Hübinette started playing one of these games and found that the language was the most easy-to-use language he had ever encountered. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)

[shahromine-diku-15] Shah, Rawn; Romine, James (1995). Playing MUDs on the Internet. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 22. ISBN 0-471-11633-5. DikuMud first appeared in mid-March of 1990 when a group of programmers at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark got together and began work on a multiplayer game that is similar to but improved on AberMuds. These coders were Hans Henrik Staerfeld, Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Michael Seifert, and Sebastian Hammer. Search this book on

[DikuMUDs-16] 16.0 ^16.1 ^16.2 ^16.3 ^16.4 Bartle, Richard (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders. p. 10. ISBN 0-13-101816-7. ...several major codebases (standalone MUD program suites) were created from the basic DikuMUD original, the main ones being Circle, Silly, and Merc. Merc spawned ROM (Rivers of MUD) and Envy, among others, and these in turn had their own spinoffs. Search this book on

[SMAUG-17] Cowan, Andrew (2001-09-17). "MUD FAQ Part 4". Internet FAQ Archives. SMAUG: [...] History: The SMAUG code started out as a Merc2.1 MUD called "Realms of Despair" in 1994. It wasn't until 1996 that it was given its name, and the first public release wasn't until December of 1996. The interest in the code spread like wildfire, and within a few months and a few revisions there had been over 20,000 downloads of the distribution.

[GodWars-18] Koster, Raph. "Online World Timeline". GodWars, a Merc derivative codebase, is released unofficially

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17]

[18]

v t e MUDs
List of MUDs
Major branches	AberMUD DikuMUD LPMud LPC MU*
Minor branches, codebases, libraries	DGD GodWars Merc MOO MudOS MUSH Talker TinyMUD TinyMUCK
Concepts, terminology	Alternate character Avatar Avatar customization Bartle taxonomy of player types Buff Camping Computer game bot Consider Cybersex God Gold farming Gold sink Griefer Grinding Hack and slash Immortal Implementer Kill stealing Lag Looting Mob / Monster MUD client MUD trees Mudflation Nerf Non-player character Online creation Online wedding Persistent world Player character Player versus environment Player versus player / Playerkilling Powerleveling Quest Remort Rent Spam Spawning spod Syntax guessing Tank Twinking Virtual goods Wizard Zone / Area
Publications	Designing Virtual Worlds Imaginary Realities Life on the Screen "A Rape in Cyberspace" "A Story About a Tree" Terra Nova A Theory of Fun for Game Design
Companies, organizations	Areae Iron Realms Entertainment Jagex Lysator Kesmai The Mud Connector Mythic Entertainment Plaintext Players Simutronics Skotos XYZZY Awards
Category:MUDs

MUD trees

Contents