Solar Eclipse

The overworld

A hundred and fifty-four overworld maps link edge to edge into one continent, 275 cells across and 210 down, with area entrances scattered over it. You walk it the same way you walk anywhere else.

See the whole of Thera →

Promotion classes

At level 120 a character can return to their guildmaster and advance. The guildmaster names whatever is still missing — mastered skills, permanent stat floors, proof that you have been somewhere and done something — and when nothing is missing you take your class's promoted form and the whole mud is told about it. Eleven of the eleven classes have a promoted form, each with its own trial, its own new skills and its own reputation award. This is the long game, and it has a section of its own.

Remorting

A hero who has run out of things to prove can remort and start again. You keep your name, your money, your standing and your skills; you lose seven eighths of your vitals and go back to level one, and you get to pick from a wider list of races than a first-life character ever sees. Skills carry across lives at the lowest level any class you have been learns them at, so a second-life character is weak but strangely capable, and a promoted class's benefits stay on the record — the choose command is how you pick which previous life's promotion you want active.

Reputation

Sixty-eight categories track what your character is actually known for, from helper to new discovery to species poacher, each with its own key and its own running total. Reputation is not experience and cannot be ground: it accrues from the breadth of what you do, and it is spent at a trader on top of the clock tower. High enough totals unlock equipment that refuses to be worn without them, entry to certain places, the right to keep more than one pet and the right to store items up to level 201. Cheating and jail time take points away.

The autoquestor

A questman in the Grunting Boar Inn, south and east of recall, will hand any character of any level a randomly generated quest scaled to them: kill something, fetch something, carry a letter, escort someone home, find a word buried in a room description, or assemble a collection. Quests pay quest points, gold and occasionally practices, and quest points buy a shelf of rewards that exists nowhere else in the game. It is also, quietly, the best tour guide on the mud — questing at low levels teaches you repop timers, day and night cycles and overland travel without anybody having to explain them. Details are in the quest section.

Mining, materials and forging

Ore deposits are scattered across the world, each holding up to four different materials on a quality ladder. With a shovel or a pick and the mining skill you dig them out; with a prospector's help you find them in the first place. What comes out of the ground is an alloy, and what an alloy is for is a forger — somebody who will appraise, refine, combine, melt and finally forge your materials into a weapon or a piece of armour whose quality depends on how much and how good a material you brought. Twenty-odd forgers work different material sets across the world, so the good recipes are also a geography problem. See the mining section.

Rune stones and rune words

A rune stone is a lump of material that will hold exactly one spell. You get one by killing something, you teach it a spell by casting that spell at it while it lies on the floor, and you spend it with fuse — welding it into a weapon so that every blow the weapon lands re-casts the stone's spell at whatever it hit. The charge runs down with use and then the stone evaporates; there is no unfusing. Every weapon has at least one rune slot and some have more. The warlock's cabala layers a second system on top, inscribing rune words along the paths of the Tree of Life.

Gems and sigils

Gems come in twenty types and ten grades — tiny, small, medium, large, rare, flawless, perfect and upward — and serve as both portable wealth and crafting stock, since a hundred gold weighs four times what the equivalent gems do. Sigils are the other half of the ornamentation system: an object that cannot be worn on its own but is attached to a normal piece of equipment, lending its affects to whoever wears the host. Most of the great quest rewards are sigils, which is how a character ends up wearing more than the sixteen slots ought to allow.

Equipment sets

Most gear in the world is interchangeable, and for two decades finishing a wardrobe did nothing. Eighteen sets now change that: assemble one and it grants something no single piece of it does — a skill that costs you less lag, an extra attack at the end of the round, damage turned back on whoever struck you, resistance that applies whatever the blow was made of.

Seven of the eighteen pay out in proportion. Those have a minimum number of pieces that earns anything at all, and from there the bonus grows with every slot you fill rather than arriving all at once — so a half-assembled set is worth wearing while you hunt for the rest. The other eleven are all or nothing.

Completion is counted in slots filled, not items owned. Several sets carry two pieces that compete for the same slot, so a bag full of the right things is not the same as wearing them. Your equipment listing shows how far along you are on every set you have started, and names the ones you have finished.

Clans and player killing

Clans are opt-in, consequential and territorial. Joining one is done through a clan leader, each clan has halls of its own, ranks and subranks, and clan equipment that is noticeably better than the ordinary gear of its level — the compensation for being permanently flaggable. Player killing is gated to particular days, so the risk is a calendar as much as a choice, and a clan sigil can be taken from a body and worn by a rival.

The arena and the coliseum

Two consenting players can challenge and accept their way into a formal death match: both are moved into one room, everyone else bets on the outcome, and the loser is restored rather than killed. The coliseum is the other fighting venue and it is solo — fight buys you a bout against a scaled opponent, and five wins there is one of the things a warrior's promotion trial asks for. It is also where the capture system cashes out.

Capture

Wield a weapon with the capture flag and everything you kill starts going on a list. The monster trainer holds ninety-seven recipes, and each one is an area's roster: catch the whole bestiary of a place and the trainer builds you that area's boss out of it. capture chat at the trainer claims the first recipe you have filled, capture all lists what you are carrying, capture boss lists what you have earned, and capture fight drops you and a live copy of one of them into a coliseum room — where the monster swings first, nobody earns experience, and an audience can watch from the gallery. A promoted ranger can spend a capture differently: capture train turns it into a pet instead of an opponent. The one thing you cannot do is catch a boss: being produced by a recipe never puts a monster on anybody else's shopping list.

Houses, land and titles

A character with enough gold can buy property outright, and it is built for them: you write to the immortals saying how much land you want, what comforts you would like and what the rooms should look like, and it is attached to the housing suburb north-west of Solaris. What you spend buys a title as well as the walls, on a published ladder — five hundred thousand gold makes you Sir or Lady, a million Lord or Dame, and it climbs through Earl, Duke and Baron to Prince at five million and King at ten. A house shared between two people splits the value down the middle for title purposes, which the rules note is not open to argument. Your own banker, trainer and healer can be hired to live in it with you.

Player-owned shops

You can own the shop as well as shop in it. A shop is commissioned by note: you supply your shopkeeper's name, the coloured name players will see, the line describing them as you walk in, a backstory if you want one, the room description, every co-owner, and the five categories of goods they will trade in — chosen from a list of twenty-odd that runs from weapons and armour through potions, instruments, boats, portals, warpstones, gems and jewellery. A hundred thousand gold falls due when the shop opens and it costs four thousand silver a month to keep the doors open. One player may hold up to five. They stand in the Solaris Bazaar, which is the one district whose contents change with the population rather than with the reset timer.

Poaching and trophies

When something dies it leaves a corpse that remembers what it was, and poach <corpse> <part> cuts a trophy off it — a hide, a horn, an eye, a tooth. The part is rated for quality by the skill of the cut, and trade sells it to a poacher who wanted that particular thing. It is a parallel income stream to looting, and a reputation category all of its own, in both directions: there is a species poacher tally as well as a payout.

Pets, taming and training

A character can own up to ten pets — bought from pet shops, captured from the wild, or in the ranger's case built out of monsters they caught. Pets follow you, recall with you, take orders, are saved with your character and can be inspected with petaffects. A promoted ranger can train them further: bash, dodge, parry, sanctuary and more, at the travelling circus east of Solaris. Reputation is what buys the right to keep more than one at a time.

Traps

Two separate trap systems run at once. Area traps belong to the world and are aimed squarely at you: they fire on opening a door, entering or leaving a room, or examining the wrong object, and they cripple, blind, poison, entangle or restrain as well as damage. Ranger traps are the other kind — entrap builds a snare, a spiked pit, a poison net or an entangling vine out of what is lying around, and only mobiles trigger them. A ranger's detect trap and detect danger are the answer to the first kind and a requirement for their promotion.

Limit breaks

Take enough punishment — a hundred times your level in damage — and your limit break becomes available for one use. Every class has a different one, they are announced by the limit command, and the counter does not survive a logout, so a limit break is something you earn inside a fight rather than something you save up. The mage drops a meteor, the warrior pins a victim so their group can beat it, the ranger unloads every malediction at once with no saving throw, the warlock reads a spell straight out of somebody else's head and casts it back at them.

Games inside the game

There is a real deck of fifty-two playing cards you can draw from, deal round a table and read as poker or blackjack hands — and a promoted thief deals themselves a hand mid-fight and turns it into damage. There is a complete fifteen-by-fifteen Scrabble implementation with a hundred tiles, premium squares and the fifty-point bonus for playing all seven. There is a full game of chess — every rule of it, on a board you carry, against another player or against an engine that plays at ten different strengths, and a second engine beside it playing xiangqi — Chinese chess, with the horse's leg, the cannon's screen and the flying general all enforced. There is a casino in New Thalos that only thieves can enter.

The deck, and what a hand looks like →
The Scrabble board, and how to play it →
The chessboard, and a game played out on it →
The xiangqi board, and the rules that are not chess's →

Guarded doors and scripted worlds

Nearly a thousand mobiles in the world carry the guard bit, standing in a room and deciding who may leave it and in which direction — checking for a key object, a class, a level, an alignment or a place you have not been yet. It is the cheapest access control the world has and it is everywhere. On top of that, three separate scripting engines run continuously: mobiles, objects and rooms each have their own triggers, their own command sets and their own evaluators, which is why the world reacts to being walked through rather than merely sitting there.

Two hundred and fifty-six colours

Most MUDs draw in the sixteen colours ANSI handed out thirty years ago. This one has the full 256-colour range as well, and color palette lays the whole of it out at once — the sixteen old ANSI colours, the 6×6×6 colour cube and the twenty-four greys, every number printed on its own colour in whichever of black or white can be read against it. Ink is written {[f###] and the ground behind it {[b###], three digits always. The old short codes still work alongside them.

color xcolor spells the codes out instead of drawing them, which is how you find the number of a colour you have seen somewhere and want for yourself; and color on its own turns the lot off for a client that would rather do without. The place to go and look is Kupo Hollow, which is painted throughout — the moogle village tells its four quarters apart by colour and by nothing else.

Building and living in it

The whole world is editable from inside the game through a full online creation suite — area, room, mobile, object, shop, reset and program editors — so areas are written by players who were promoted into builders, not by someone with a text editor and a restart. For everyone else there is the comfort layer: MXP for clients that speak it, aliases, a built-in pager, speedwalk strings for people playing over bare telnet, a hundred-plus configurable toggles, and copyover, which reboots the server without disconnecting anybody.