[Parnassus]

I really liked the Dead Souls intermud chat. The people there were very interesting and helpful. I found the base mud a bit difficult but the documentation was very good.

For the type of sandbox the original poster asked for, I think I'd go very basic, like rom or diku, just because they come with enough areas to play around in. However, the higher you go, the more in-depth the building becomes. My experience is limited but I think the smaug building is harder, but more interesting, than diku. However, there were a lot of things that I couldn't get smaug to do that I can build in TBA. I couldn't really get the hang of building in Dead Souls but I'm sure that other people find it easy enough.

I guess that the base needed depends on a few things. If you build areas, are you planning on releasing them to a particular mud? If you are, you should be using whatever base they are, to make it easier to import. Keep in mind that their code would probably have evolved so you can't expect everything to import exactly.

If you just want to keep the areas for the two of you to play with, how big did you want your starter world before you begin building?

Do you mud already? Would you like a familiar world or one completely different?

IZDemon, I think it would have been better to check other threads since there are a lot that deal with starting muds. The original post here had very little comparison with your post. My off-the-cuff thought is to go with C since a lot of the classic muds are coded in C. This makes it easy to open a classic base, such as rom and diku, and poke around inside to see how it runs. However, this makes it very easy to bump into copyright laws about derivatives.