[camlorn]

Well, there's 3 kingdoms, which I come back to a lot. Before I say anymore, I will warn that it has donations-for-ingame-perks, though many get by without them. They don't really add much in the way of power; they're just nice things like longer friend lists (50 is the default, I think). O, and eq doesn't save over boot.

So why does it fit: they do have crafting. It is complex, and will help with your survival. Essentially, crafting is an alternative to a bootrun, if you are familiar with the concept, and resources do save, even if the eq doesn't. They did a good job with it: cooking is free-form, without any predefined recipes, rangling is killing mobs to suck their essence/soul/whatever, and no one has yet figured out how exactly farming works, though it is possible to succeed at it if you have the patients for the failures. They also have guilds; on 3k, some require recruitment, but they have a sister mud called 3scapes which doesn't and has most of the same ones. WEven then, it's not like you have to apply; it's more of a tell so-and-so "I want to join your guild, can you recruit me?" and you're in. Very, very unique guilds; mages actually summon stuff to follow them around with a chance of it turning on you if you're not careful, bards actually have magical songs with lyrics that take multiple rounds to sing, and a whole bunch of other stuff including shapeshifters. O, and it has players and lots of them, so you don't know everyone right off the bat.

Others that fit what you want, and I hesitate to reccomend these two because they don't have active coders, but dark legacy beats everyone for crafting and project bob beats everyone for classless, so idk. Depends on if you care about changes/stability; the former can reliably be crashed by players (the method to do so is used in loo of a head admin to do reboots, remember what I said about inactive staff). The latter has barely active admin, but is stable enough to get along without them; that said, there was one serious bug where a character could only use tells
and it wasn't resolved when i left after two months...I left because of that, actually. Extremely fun, though, both of those.

Unfortunately, crafting and pve is rare. Batmud has it, and some other neet features, but you can't just jump into it; I know dark and shattered lands does, but again, it's a high level activity. Alter aeon does have most of the requirements you asked for, but only offers alchemy/poisons at last check.

For crafting in an rp environment that isn't awful, there is dartmud; it gets repetative fast, however.

Godwars2 has, among other things, a cool combat system and a small bit of crafting; it is completely pk, however, and has some other issues.

Try 7th plane. It has everything you asked for, including easy mob interaction and fully developed crafting.

Pick any coffeemud out there, and they probably kept the stock classes; the stock coffeemud classes are complete, which is unfortunate imho as it doesn't leave room for originality, but they do have crafting and it is definitely comprehensive. It is only recent that coffeemuds have been picking up, however.

Lensmoor has crafting, and it is very detailed and necessary, but I'm not qualified to talk about it in anything resembling a helpful capacity, mostly because i only played for a few weeks.

I honestly think I just covered almost every mud in existance with crafting worth talking about; does anyone know of any more? Tbh, I'm interested in this question too.

ps: easy quest interaction: Most muds don't have it. Of the above, only alter aeon has easy, simple, non-guess-the-magic-word talk command; you're not going to find that feature, at least not completely. A sign of a good builder, in my opinion, is getting a reaction to anything you try, so long as it is at least within the realm of possibility...I agree, guess-the-word games are annoying.