I'm interested in creating my own MUD. Where should I start? Any Basics I should know? My only experience is as a player for 5 years. I'd love to create my own world from scratch, thats what drives me to create a MUD.

Heya,

A good place to start is ftp.game.org, you can download several codebases there and get used to them. Also checking out this forum and the other mud forums (mentioned around here at several places) will help. Get yourself on a coders mailing list and see what they have to say.

Greetings Dre

I agree with Dre. Also, you may want to download the codebase you have had the most time as a player. This would allow you to have a basic understanding. If you can run it locally go for it on a unix/linux OS preferrably. If not try looking into some of the hosting services out there. Kyndig has a nice setup for a builder package. I would read every resource you can find. The threads here are an excellent source for knowledge. If the codebase you use has a mailing list I would join it. The mud connector is a vast resource also.
I hope this was some good to you.

Nostrum "The Supreme Monkey Boy"

Well, let me say I am a TOTAL newbie when it comes to this "MUD creation". Even if I do download it, I won'tknow where to go from there. I really need to know the basics first.

You probably need to start by defining your aims - is it just to see what is involved in setting up a mud, or a "trial run" to learn enough about coding and building to open a real mud later, or is it intended to grow into a real mud ?

You also need to look at what you have available - time, money, skills, hardware, potential staff etc.

It's always useful to get some experience first, by acting as an immortal on somebody else's mud before starting your own.

Now for some more concrete suggestions:
You'll need to find somewhere to run it. Whilst it's possible to run a mud on Windows, it's much better to use *nix, so you need to make your decision what to use:
Home PC with Windows - in which case get a windows C compiler
Home PC with cygwin - in which case download and install cygwin, and learn enough unix to handle it
Home PC with linux - unless you already have linux installed, obtain a copy, install it, and learn enough to use it
Rent (or obtain for free) a linux shell account (again learn enough linux/unix to use it)

Assuming you are not starting your mud from scratch, the next step is to choose, obtain and install a codebase (or to use LPC and choose, obtain and install a mudlib and driver).

Choice is difficult to advise you on. Possibly the simplest is to choose the one you've liked most as a player, or to choose one of the widely used diku-derivatives (circle, smaug, rom etc).

Kyndig () has a good selection of codebases to download, though in some cases there are also sites devoted to particular codebases.

There are other possibilities, but this covers the 'usual' way to get started.