mudname: ZombieMUD
url: http://www.zombiemud.org
port: zombiemud.org 23
theme: Medieval-Fantasy
focus: Hack-n-Slash with an emphasis on exploration and solving the various secrets of the realm. RP is generally accepted, but not monitored or enforced.
features: -No closed in newbie school, instead you enter the game directly with your own personal guide, a floating skull, to fully walk you through gaining levels, studying in your guildhall, and your first kills. It will interactivly teach you in real time about each new place you discover as you wander the game. As Zombie is a non-standard LPmud, it is highly recommended that new players take the full tour, when given a choice upon character creation.-Probably most importantly, ZombieMUD is an all original world. Each guild and race has been hand crafted and balanced off eachother.
- Each different in its own right, Zombie offers 500+ Spells and 350+ Skills to be learned in the various guildhalls of the realm.
- The land is vast, with an outworld of over a million rooms, and 13,500+ Hand-crafted rooms complete with an explore status plaque to check your explorer’s ranking. Exploration of the world expands in all directions, including flying through the skies and swimming deep beneath the ocean’s waves.
- When playing the game, you will find that the 8 Member Party system becomes an integral part of ZombieMUD life. Through parties, you team your skills with the skills of other players to bring down foes of legendary size and strength.
- For the collector in you, almost anything found upon the game, including Equipment, is saveable over reboots in lockers or chests. You may also build, personalize, and secure your own permanant Castle to store your equipment chests.
- Over 200 Level Quests are available to reduce level costs, but they are not forced upon you. If you love questing, then you may quest to your heart’s content.
- ZombieMUD’s Reincarnation system allows your to try out every character combination you wish, without having to re-earn all of your character’s gained experience.
- An automated Event system runs random activities in the game throughout the day, and there are sometimes special Wizard-run events as well just to keep you on your toes.
- ZombieMUD has an Apprenticeship system for those players new to the game, and many high ranking players are more than happy to take dedicated people on as an apprentice.
- Our internal triggering system known as chaining can be used along with various player defined commands and aliases to customize your play.
- An extensive channel system exists on the game, keeping you in touch with your guild members and party mates. Private channels may be created at any time on the game, and the option to purchase permanant private channels also exists.
excerpt: Since 1994, ZombieMUD has brought orc-bashing mayhem to thousands over the years. With over 100 players on-line to interact with, over a dozen distinctive guilds, fifty sub-guilds, and three dozen races to choose from, your only limitation is your own imagination and will to succeed.
log_snippet: n/a
status: 1994, Fully Functional
codebase: LP: LDmud driver, Zombie Lib
average_players: 100+
Review by Umbra
Website
Excellent, easy to browse, with lots of useful information. There are some minor typos there, mostly in the form of reversed letters, (example: ’glimsping’), but the text is obviously written by someone literate. There is info about skills and spells, races and guilds, special Newbie info, an overall map with short descriptions of the zones and much more. The world is vast, with all original zones, and you get special points for exploring. Lots of interesting-looking skills and spells too. Many races, which are apparently undergoing an overhaul, to make them more specialised.
They allow full PK, but with rules to avoid it running rampant. Those rules are a bit too extensive for my own taste, but they do make sense, and hopefully they get enforced enough to keep things in check.
They have built-in quests, automated daily events and sporadic imm-run events.
The Newbie introduction on the website is solid. There are several newbie zones, with info about how to reach them at the main page. There is also an apprentice system, where older players tutor new ones.
Credits
Didn’t see any, but from what I’ve been told, LP Muds don’t need them.
Char generation
Easy and fast. In spite of the numerous races and guilds they have, the choices for newbies are restricted to six combinations, or rather they advise you to choose any of those six, since the other are much harder to start with. I think that is good; too many choices just gets confusing for newbies. And there is also an option to reincarnate without loss of all the exp you earned, if you choose the wrong combination, or just want to try something new.
Playerbase
157 players on-line right now, according to ‘Who’s online’ on the website, confirmed by the WHO command. And this is at a low-tide time for USA. The mud is hosted in Finland and the playerbase is said to be mostly European, but it’s still impressive for a free mud. It’s pretty quiet too, so most of the existing channels must be shut off for new players by default.
Newbie Introduction
They have a rather original and interesting approach to this. There is no traditional Mud School, instead you are turned loose directly into the game, but with a personal guide in the form of a talking skull. This worked very smoothly at first, the skull prompting me about what to type in at each new situation.
Eventually there was some grit in the machinery though. The skull kept prompting me what to type to train my skills, and when I did I got a message that no such skills existed. Which went on for quite some time, with me trying out different approaches of what to type, and still getting the same result.
I asked about what to do on the newbie channel, and got several responses, some of them over tell. With me trying to respond individually and the skull still prompting me to train my skills every 30 seconds, it started to become quite spammy, and it got worse, when suddenly warnings started to flash over the screen about an upcoming Armageddon in 25 minutes.
Armageddon and Rent
Apparently they shut down the Mud for a reboot once a day, and when they do all players have to put all their gear in some kind of locker, or they’ll lose it. Rent is cheap for Newbies, but you still need to find the locker room, if you want to keep your gear.
The reboot warnings got increasingly spammy, with new global 5-line alerts every three minutes or so, added to the nagging from my skull. Through it all the helpful players stayed helpful, and eventually an Admin of some sorts swooped down on me, to check what was wrong. She told me that the reason I couldn’t train the skills was that they were already trained enough. I am definitely not aware of having trained them actively, so my guess is they put in some code change lately to upgrade them automatically once you entered the guild, and then forgot to upgrade the skull too.
Anyway, I didn’t have time to dwell on it, since the warnings kept urging me to get to the locker room and save my equipment before the world went up in flames. I asked my friendly Admin if I could just leave before the Big bang and she advised me to just save and quit, since I didn’t even have any gear yet. Sounded like good advice, so I followed it
Having to rent at logout is a major drawback for most Mud players. As for myself, I don’t really mind the Rent, but I did mind the Armageddon. Even for me, a newbie with nothing to lose, it got rather stressful, and I can only guess how frustrating it must be if you are in the middle of some task in a remote area. I think that a long established Mud really shouldn’t need a full reboot once a day, and even if they do, there should be some more discreet and less disruptive way of carrying it out, without everyone having to rent.
On the other hand, their players seem to have adjusted to it, or there wouldn’t have been so many of them on line close to that time.
Early Combat
So, I logged on the next day finding myself outside the main Temple, with the friendly Teleport Mob Buju, who offered to transport me to several places of my choice. My ever present skull had stopped nagging me about training, (I guess all I had needed to do to stop it would have been to leave the Training room). Instead it suggested that I go to the Newbie Arena, to check out some combat, and I complied, (especially since that had been my plan all along), and got a teleport there. At the entrance you also get some basic equipment and some sort of log to keep track of your ‘best kills’.
The Newbie Arena consists of a few rooms, all with a number of non-aggro, non-assisting mobs. The rooms all have different themes, a desert, a swamp, a jungle, a polar scene etc. Not very consistent, but the descriptions were well written, and the mobs suited to their environment.
Combat is not much different from the usual Mud setup, at least not at this low level. You and the mob each get one attack per round. My trusty skull advised me to apply one of my skills, by typing ‘use kick at salamander’, and keep retyping it each round if I didn’t immediately kill the mob. This switches the weak automated attack to a slightly more powerful skill attack. If you try to type it more often than once per round, you lose the option for one round, (which I think is a good precaution against triggers).
Having to type out ‘use kick at salamander’ instead of just ‘kick sal’ seemed a bit circumstantial, but there are of course hotkeys and aliases that you can set up, and the webpage and helpfiles teach you how to do it. I chose not to, since I wanted to see if my skull would prompt me to do it, but so far he hasn’t. (Stupid numb-skull, guess I’ll set my aliases now).
You get higher points for trying new mobs, instead of doing the easy thing and stick to the same kind. The first level came almost immediately, and my skull told me to go back to the city to raise first my level, then my Guild level, in two different rooms, and then go back to the Arena. With the free teleport this was a quick operation.
I came across two original things in that arena. The first was that unless you disposed of the corpses of the mobs you killed, by burying them or handing them in to some kind of morgue, some of them very appropriately turned into zombies that attacked you in retaliation. The zombies were slightly tougher than the original mobs, and hopefully only aggressive against their killer. I think the average player will regard the aggro zombies as an extra leveling bonus, since in a newbie area like this they still are an easy kill. In a harder area with other aggro or assisting mobs, they could quickly become a major problem though. Both is OK with me, I rather like the idea.
The other strange thing was a gong in one of the rooms, which you could strike with a stick that you found after some searching. I tried it out, and it triggered a rather long but well-written script with a gorilla that rushed into the room, told you it had escaped from a circus and didn’t want to return, and then rushed out again. I have yet to discover any real purpose with the gorilla, but I assume it’s part of some quest. Perhaps you’re just supposed to kill the gorilla. Or it is an introduction to the search command?
After the first easy level, getting the next one required a lot more of grinding, and I eventually tired of it, and decided to have a quick walk around the central town instead.
Gender Bug
Their gender code seems slightly buggy. The teleport mob keeps calling me ‘Master’ although I am pretty sure I created as a female, and I saw it address a guy with an obvious male name as ‘Mistress’. When I asked the helpful Admin about it, she explained that the mobs were confused because they saw me as an ‘it’, and that there was a spell, ‘sexchange’, that I could ask a cleric to perform on me. Still, when she left the room, it was with the message of spreading HIS wings and taking off.
Center City
This is the log-in place that contains all game essential things, like shops, guilds etc. I keep repopping in the city regardless of where I log out. Not sure if this is still the case at higher levels.
The room descs aren’t all that great, they mostly describe the adjoining rooms, and I came across a few ‘You are walking’ and ‘You are standing’. But the zone fills its purpose as centre city very well. There is a map available in game for the City, and on top of each room, you get a small part of that map, when you move around. This makes it easy to navigate. You don’t get any of the promised ‘exploration points’ for moving around in a mapped zone of course, but that makes sense to me.
There are several shops where you can by different things, like weapons, armour and food, and also sell the loot you collect. This apparently is worth the time, I saw a player in one of the shop sell so many things in one command, that it spammed me out of my screen.
My trusty skull is still helpful, offering assistance when you enter certain rooms, and giving random tips about various things in between. A bit spammy sometimes, but mostly appreciated.
Newbie Zones
After having gotten a couple of more levels, the skull advised me to check out a couple of other newbie zones, giving detailed directions how to go there and back. The one I tried first was a kind of forest grid, and I was told to kill as many animals that I could, but stay clear of the dwarfs. Unfortunately the first mob I attacked (a lynx), handed me my ass on a platter, and only my wimpy saved me. If you don’t manage to kill a mob, it starts to hunt you, so in the end I had to log out (and lose all my crappy gear again) to be able to go back there. Guess I should have stuck to rabbits and squirrels.
I had a bit more success later, but the fact is that many of those Newbie mobs were on the edge of what I could handle with my crappy gear and single skill, and since my consider command still doesn’t work it was hard to know what to attack. Even the rats in another of the newbie zones were a bit on the tough side. Most of the newbie zones seem to be ‘leveling grids’, but some offer quests too.
Conclusion
Guess this is when it would normally be time to try to get hold of some good equipment and start paying the Rent. Or else try to find a group to help leveling, which shouldn’t be too hard with this large playerbase. (I see people calling for groups on the global channel pretty often.)
But I think I’ve seen everything I need to make a conclusion. This is obviously a high quality Mud. Apart from the Armageddon I haven’t seen anything that I really dislike, the small flaws I can live with.
It’s Newbie friendly, it has a large and helpful playerbase and, in spite of full PK, no jerks that jump out to kill you as soon as you leave the newbie zones. A lot of work has gone into this game, it’s well done and consistent and seems to have just about anything I can think of.
I would definitely recommend this mud to anyone, including my friends. Unless I am missing something really obvious, I don’t think we should hesitate a minute to accept them on the list.
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