MUME IX: Summary of Changes
During the many years since MUME VIII, a great number of additions were made to MUME.Areas
With the launch of MUME IX, two new areas were opened. The first of these was the rebuild of the Bree-land, from Bree-hill to Fornost, including the town of Bree itself. The other new area was rebuild of the southern half of the Ancient Broken Road, which added not only the road itself, but dangerous goblin hideouts, monstrous snow giants, and hidden treasures deep beneath the Misty Mountains.The game world has increased in size by 40% during the last twenty years from roughly 20k rooms in 2002 to 28k rooms in 2022. Simply put, a staggering number of areas have been opened for exploration since MUME VIII:
- South Downs where a shaman named Brolg has raised his banner
- Forest of Fangorn where even the trees speak
- Borderlands along the Anduin where the One Ring was lost
- Vision of the Witch-king within Galadriel’s mirror
- Spider- and Orc-infested mountains of Mirkwood
- Deep warrens under the Ettenmoors where trolls live
- Plains of Dunland, to find a roaming Dunlending chieftain
- Tower of Elostirion within the Tower Hills
- Tomb of the Chieftain of Belegost near the Grey Havens
- Growing shadow in Southern Mirkwood before Dol Guldur
Subraces
The Dwarves were given the choice to join one of the Dwarven Houses: the Longbeards, Firebeards, or Broadbeams. The Firebeards and Broadbeams built the two Dwarven cities in the Blue Mountains, Nogrod and Belegost. Durin’s Folk, also known as the Longbeards, built Khazad-dûm, later known as Moria.On the other side of the war, the Uruk-Tarkhnarb were joined by fierce Uruk-Morruhk tribe and brought their own set of features to Sauron’s minions.
Additionally, a number of new features were added to existing subraces to make the characters more powerful. Up until MUME IX’s launch, new subrace features exist for:- Men: Beornings, Rohirrim, Eriadorians, Black Númenóreans, Dúnedain
- Hobbits: Stoors, Fallohides, Harfoots
- Elves: Sindar, Silvan
- Trolls: Hill Trolls, Mountain Trolls, Cave Trolls
- Orcs: Tarkhnarb
Skills and Spells
A new healing spell was added to Orc Shamans, Energy Drain. A very mana-efficient healing spell which requires the death of an unfortunate victim to drain healing energy from.In the year before, Dark Oath was introduced as a unique skill for Black Númenóreans. Other spells and skills added were Smother, Cure Disease and Call Familiar.
Other Features Introduced in the Years Leading up to MUME IX
Gameplay
- Gandalf introduces new players to MUME in a memorable event
- Climb modes were added
- The rent-cost system was overhauled
- Level power was rebalanced
- The training system was extended to include abilities (stats)
- The achievement, quest journal, and hint systems were added
- Keyword aliases were added
- New socials were added
- A name generator was created to ease the use of appropriate names
- Spears were changed to be aware of weapon length
Utility/Design/UI
- Graphical mappers became mainstream and allowed
- Several new colour and spam settings were added
- Prompts were made more flexible
- Reckoning of time restarted eight times
- Passwords are now stored as SHA-256 hashes, replacing MD5. Character passwords were removed
- The XML mode for computer-friendly game output was added to support mappers
- UTF-8 character encoding support was added
- Support for TLS-encrypted connections was added
- Support for the GMCP, Charset, MCCP 2, MNES, and MSSP telnet protocols were added
- The mume.org website was redesigned a few times
- Players paid for a new machine to run the game. After some years the game moved back to Switzerland from Norway. It now runs on a virtual machine.
- Vm candidates got more chances to demonstrate their worth, by mudlling as Maiar
- The game (and the mudlle compiler) was ported to 64-bit x86 Linux (from 32-bit x86 Linux; before that it ran on 32-bit SPARC Solaris)
- The game’s data files are now versioned using git
Built with ♥ by the MUME IX Development Team