The Forest After Dark

Introduction

The Forest After Dark MUD is a social and experimental mud. It's social in that people come to hang out with people that they want to keep in touch with. It's experimental in that, if you want to mess around with MUD programming, it's easy to do. To get a character on the MUD, connect and request one.

A MUD is historically a Multi-User Dungeon, which were originally text-based role-playing games. Many MUDs exist now that serve other collaborative purposes. (like socializing) Further, this MUD is actually a MOO, which stands for MUD, Object Oriented. Even further, for those who care, this MUD is running on a LambdaMOO server, based on the JHCore database.

There is a vague forest theme. It's vague in that most everything was setup in the beginning to fit with the forest theme, but many things go outside that theme, which is ok. (And after all, in reality, you can build anything in a forest if you cut down all the trees.)

The history of the Forest After Dark is as follows. In the MCS division at Argonne National Lab, a MOO is in place for work purposes. However, there is one room on the MOO for purely social purposes, called the Treetop. The Forest After Dark MUD was created for a few reasons:

A lot of the people still hanging out in the treetop weren't associated with MCS anymore, such as summer students.
We wanted to get a bunch of other people on the MUD who had no reason to get a character on the MCS MUD, such as friends.
We wanted a more liberal environment in which to program fun MUD objects.
We wanted a more liberal environment in which to, umm, speak our mind.

The Forest After Dark started January 14th or 15th of 2003. It initially was served via cable modem under a desk in an apartment in Madison, WI and had just one room with the description "You currently see a very boring place." But times have changed... It was then served from a university net connection in Lincoln, NE for a while, and now has moved to being served from a person's house around Chicago. Amazingly, it has been served from three different states in about three months. :)

Alan Bailey (Q*Bert) is the founder and did a lot during the initial setup of the MUD. The Dude (El Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing) and Cory Lueninghoener (PitfallHarry) did a lot of other work in making the MUD "livable" and fun.

This MUD keeps with the Treetop theme by being a Forest. The After Dark suffix also has some history to it. Sometimes conversation on the Treetop would get a little 'adult', thus giving it the title Treetop After Dark. Since there are no restrictions on conversation in the Forest, it is always After Dark.

Connecting

The MUD is located at forest.moo.mud.org, port 7777. If that's all the information you need, then rock on. Read on if you need more instruction.

We also run listening proxies on ports 1723, 7779 and 8080, since some places are blocking useful ports.

Connecting With `telnet`

On any platform, there is usually a way to use telnet to connect to a remote machine. If you want to do this, telnet to forest.moo.mud.org 7779.

Warning, this will probably be pretty crappy.

Connecting In Windows

There are many Windows clients out there to connect to MUDs and MOOs. One that has been suggested is SimpleMU, at http://simplemu.onlineroleplay.com. Another suggested one is tkmoo-light, at http://www.awns.com/tkMOO-light/

Feel free to try out other clients and give reviews. You will probably need to enter forest.moo.mud.org as the host and 7777 as the port during some setup.

Connecting In OS X

An OS X user suggested the following MUD client for MAC OS X: http://www.solidsun.com/cm/

Yet another OS X user has suggested: http://mudwalker.cubik.org

Further, a whole pile of OS X clients have been found, although not particularly suggested: http://www.hsoi.com/mud/clients.

Connecting In UNIX

There are a number of ways to connect from UNIX. One way is with TinyFugue, a terminal MUD client, which can be downloaded here: http://www.muq.org/~hawkeye/tf/. To connect with tinyfugue after it's installed, do:

tf forest.moo.mud.org 7779.

Another suggested way is from within emacs. You will need to download an emacs-lisp source file in order to connect to the mud, which can be found here. Save that somewhere in your home directory. (~/lib/emacs/mud.el is a good place.)

Then, you will need to add a line to your .emacs file to load the file you just saved. Something like the following:

(load "mud.el")

After that is in place, you should be able to run emacs, do M-x mud (M-x usually means pressing ESC then x), get a prompt for the Forest MUD, press enter, and be at the connection screen.

Further, there is an awesome program that will let you stay connected on the MUD as long as you wish, and that will let you access the same connection from anywhere. Use the screen program to do this:

To start up:
screen emacs -nw (and then M-x mud, etc...)

To detach your session (so that you can temporarily exit and reattach later), do C-A D within emacs (which means hold down Control and then press A and D.).

To reattach to your session:
screen -r

and you will be right where you left off before! Refer to man screen for more information.

After you are connected

After you are connected, you will be at the Edge of the Forest. There will usually be no one else here. This is just fine, because there are some administrative things to take care of.

Read the policy information on using the MUD. There are two sets of policies. The first set contains general manners, which can be accessed by executing help manners. The second set contains extra policies for users, which can be accessed by executing help user-policy.
If you become a programmer, you will need to also read help programmer-policy
Make sure you read and adhere to all of these documents! Your account may be suspended if you break the rules.
Change your password. Make sure you do this! This can be done by entering the following into your MUD session:
@password <old> <new>
And of course, don't forget your new password either, as that would defeat the purpose. Note that this password is transmitted plaintext and isn't that secure, so you may not want to use passwords that you care about.
Set your gender. Because the MUD does spiffy stuff with pronouns and other things with the English language, you need to specify your gender. Do that with:
@gender male
or
@gender female
There are other options too. (don't ask)
Describe yourself. You just need to add some witty description of yourself. It can be realistic or entirely virtual. Do that with:
@describe me as "I am an awesome person."
Change your name. If you ever wish to change your name, you are free to, and can do it with:
@rename me to <newname>

Good, you are now a valid member of (the Forest) society.

How to Navigate

Since this is a MUD, there are ways of moving about in the virtual world. The most useful command is simply look. This will tell you about the room you are in, who or what else is in the room, and possibly some ways to exit the room.

Moving is simple. Usually the possible directions in which to move are north, south, east, west, up, and down. Enter any of these to move in that direction. Alternatively, you can use n, s, e, w, u, d.

Another good way to move is the walk to command. If you know the name of a room you want to get to, type: walk to <room>. For example, many people on the Forest MUD hang out in the Cabin, so you can type:

walk to Cabin

to get to where everyone (probably) is.

Another command to know is @sethome, which can be used to set your home to the room you are currently in. This means that in the future, when you connect, you will be plopped into that room. For most people, you probably want to do a @sethome after you get to the Cabin.

Of course, there are also people and things in the mud too. Use look <character> to look at someone else. Use look <object> to look at an object. To see what actions you can do on a player or object, use examine <character>.

How to Communicate

There are a few ways to communicate on the mud. The first three ways are essential, the other three aren't as much, but you'll quickly learn them.

First, there is general speech. This is done by simply prepending your words with a double quote, like this:
"I am testing out speaking.
which will appear like this:
You say, "I am testing out speaking."
Second, there is directed speech. This is similar to general speech, but you direct it at a certain person so it's obvious who you are talking to. This can be done by putting their character name, and then a comma, and then your text:
Knarf, hi there
which will appear like this:
You [to Knarf]: hi there
In addition, you may not need to provide the whole name when talking to someone. If the name you provide can uniquely identify the person you are trying to talk to, this will be successful. Also, some people may have aliases, which you can find with @aliases <player>.
The final thing to know about directed speech, and this may be considered an advanced feature, is how to talk to two people at once. This can be done by putting both of the names at the beginning of the line, without spaces in between the names. For example:
Knarf,Pitfall, I'm talking to both of you.
which will appear like this:
You [to Knarf and PitfallHarry]: I'm talking to both of you.
There is method to make your character act out, or emote an emotion. This is done by prepending a colon onto your action:
:dances around like a fool.
which will appear to everyone as:
Q*Bert dances around like a fool.
Lastly, there is a method to let people know what you are thinking. This is done with the think command:
think boy, what should I do now.
which will appear to everyone as:
Q*Bert . o O ( boy, what should I do now. )
Whispering is used like directed speech, except that no one else can see what you are saying to the person. Useful for talking to someone when you don't want everyone else to know about it. This is done with the peculiar mu command (short for murmer):
mu Knarf hi there, I am whispering
which will appear like this:
You whisper to Knarf, "hi there, I am whispering"
There is also a method to make your character act out, or emote an emotion to a single person, much like a whisper. This is done with the plus sign (+), like so:
+DesertDave does something special for DesertDave.
which will appear to you as:
(to DesertDave) Q*Bert does something special for DesertDave.

Getting Help

Getting help on the MUD is done with the help command. To ask for help on a specific topic, for example, programming, do:
help programming.

However, the MOO help documentation is usually scarce and hard to navigate, so you can ask someone else on the MUD.

Common Usage

There are some cultural things that you should know about.

Blinking. People blink to let people know that they are once again paying attention to the mud. This is handy, especially since many people keep their MUD session open for a long time (or forever). You can blink with bl.
Idling. On the other hand, idling is a way to let people know you aren't paying any more attention. This can be done with idle. You can add an idle message to let people know why you are idling: idle sick of the mud.
Poking. Poking is a way to get someone's attention. When someone pokes you, that usually means they want to ask you something or tell you something.
Verbs. These are handy verbs with which to do things to other people. You can get a complete list with the @antisocial command. Ignore the bad name of the command, since many of these are not antisocial. You can do these by using the action followed by the person's name. To hug Nire, do: hug nire. Some popular ones:
```
maul
eye
peer
poke
hug
grin
```
There are some shortcuts for common actions which are handy to know. You will notice many people using these. These can be done by using the command followed by the person's name. So to wave to sarahdipity, do: wa sarahdipity.
```
wa is wave.
nd is nod.
ns is nod solemnly.
h is heh.
gr is grin.
sm is smile.
gg is giggle.
si is sigh.
bl is blink.
la is laugh.
da is dance.
lol is laugh out loud.
```
If you do help cts, this will give you the help on the CTS (carpal tunnel syndrome) features.

Attractions

There are a few things in the MUD that make it an easy procrastination tool. Here they are:

By far, the coolest object in the MUD is a little robot that talks back to you and sometimes does funny stuff or says funny stuff. Talk to Neil who hangs out in the Cabin and you'll get the gist of it.
But of course, you can't just have one robot. Also, God, Ralph Wiggum, and Lien hang out in the Cabin, and you can talk to them.
There is a rollercoaster! If you type walk to platform, you should get to the rollercoaster platform. Then, ride roller to ride it.
There is a fortune cookie in the Cabin. Type examine cookie to see all the things you can do with it.
A statue of Buddha that is funny for a few seconds lives in the temple.
This could almost be put in a Tips section, but there is a handy tool for when people paste long URLs. If a URL is too long, there is a nifty object that will contact http://www.snurl.com and produce a nice manageable link. Just paste your URLs in and it will do the job for you.

Advanced Features

Some more advanced features are listed on this page. Once you've mastered everything on this page, go on to that one. :)

Programming Resources

If you want to try programming, here are a few good documents.

A good place to start with programming is http://cmc.uib.no/moo/.

A good user-friendly reference is http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/help/moo/programming/.

A not-so-user-friendly but complete reference is http://cmc.uib.no/moo/docs/manuals/formatted/html/ProgrammersManual_toc.html.