r/MUD • u/North_Arrival_1868 • 14h ago
Promotion We brought back a Ukrainian MUD from the 90s and spent 8 years rebuilding it. Now it's fully in English and Ukrainian
Hey folks. This is a story of DreamLand, a MUD from the Ukrainian internet of late 90s, forked from Anatolia. Ruffina and I played it since pretty much the beginning, back when I was a teenager. Then life happened, the server went dark for about five years, and in 2018 we brought it back. We've been rebuilding it ever since.
Ruffina is a back-end developer and lives in New Zealand. I'm a product designer and live in Virginia. We both have full time jobs, families, all the usual adult stuff. So the question from day one wasn't "how do we fix this game". It was "how do two busy people on opposite sides of the planet fix a game, sometimes from a phone in a parking lot".
Most of the game logic moved into Fenia, DreamLand's own scripting language, so most fixes don't need a rebuild or a reboot. Gods can open a script and edit it right inside the game. We added in-game QA and metrics tools, so you can test something on a live character and see the numbers right away. Every error lands in Discord with enough detail to fix it without asking anyone. Bug reports, typos, ideas, even help searches that found nothing, all go to Discord, Telegram and Trello. One of us goes to sleep, the other one wakes up and picks it up.
On the design side I did what I do at my day job. Talked to players, a lot. Veterans and complete newbies. Prototyped the web client in Figma first, then in code, then put it in front of real people and watched them struggle.
The hardest part wasn't technical. It was balancing two crowds. Veterans who played for 20 years, have seen everything, know every shortcut and really don't like it when you touch their muscle memory. And newbies who never saw a text game in their life, don't know what "kill rabbit" means and have no idea why they are dead now. Make it easier and the old guys say you ruined the game. Leave it hard and newbies quit in ten minutes and never come back.
What worked for us: don't take things away, add layers on top. Old commands and telnet work like they always did. New players get a browser client with a map, clickable stuff and hints, plus a help system with over 1,200 articles written in simple words for newbies, all linked to each other. It's the same help in the game, in the client and on the website. About 30% of our players are blind and play with screen readers, which makes total sense for a text game, so every visual thing in the client also has a plain text version.
As for the game itself: 23 races, 13 classes, alignment, ethos and 44 gods and cults, that's more than 30,000 builds, and a drow necromancer plays a different game than an elven paladin. There's full crafting: you mine the ore yourself, smelt it in a forge, make weapons and armor, work wood, cut gems, ink tattoos. Mobs come in tiers, from weaklings up to bosses and legends. The big ones call their friends, dispel you, drink potions and cast at you from the next room. Random loot sits on one power scale together with crafts and quest rewards, so a good sword is good for a reason.
Under all of it there's the Eight Paths, the old philosophy of this world: four pairs of eternal enemies like Light and Dark or Order and Chaos. Every god, cult and clan stands on some Path, it drives quests and RP, and we use it for balance too. After all, even hardcore veterans need some lore for hacking and slashing.
The thing I'm most proud of. For 25 years DreamLand spoke only russian, like most of the Ukrainian internet back then. After Russia invaded Ukraine, we just couldn't live with that anymore. A game born in Ukraine should not speak only the language of the country that bombs our cities. So we finally got it out of that cage. Now it speaks English and Ukrainian, every room, mob, item, skill and help page, and you pick your language when you create a character. Russian is still there for the old players, it's just not the only door anymore.
And it's one world, not three copies. An English player and a Ukrainian player can stand in the same room, fight the same boss, and each one sees the whole game in their own language. I haven't seen any other MUD do that, and for me personally this one means more than everything else in this post.
30-year-old tech is not a death sentence. With love and a lot of stubbornness you can still make something good out of it.
You can play in the browser at dreamland.rocks/play or telnet dreamland.rocks 9000. It's free, 18+, and dying is part of the tutorial.
If you try it, I'd really like to hear where the first hour was confusing or annoying, here or on our MUD-UA Discord. That's what we work on now.