CircleMUD

CircleMUD

Arguably the most popular of the MUD codebases, if not at least the most popular one by Implementors/Admins from the Diku family.

Many were the coder and admin who eagerly awaited every single release from Circle, year after year. Every single patch was quickly downloaded and applied to existing MUDs, fixing bugs, increasing stability, and advancing extensibility.

CircleMUD also enjoyed help from the Diku community at large, constantly provided with new areas and "snippets" of functionality (e.g. spells, classes, mobscripts, etc.) to either be incorporated into the official releases, or as something to be shared among admins to freely add to their own MUDs.

Circle is considered to be one of the most highly advanced and evolved MUDs, providing a staggering amount of ready-to-play areas, skills, spells, the four basic classes, Mob scripts, and documentation. That documentation was not only impressive, but the extensibility of the project made a perfect match. It was the simplest thing for a coder to add in a new class, a new spell, or a new "Smart" mobile in a single sitting.

A lot that Circle has to offer comes as a result of the amazing work already pioneered by DikuMUD. While its contemporaries, such as Copper and Merc were also impressive, Circle took the "hack-and-slash" MUD coding world by storm.
There was a particularly long period where development paused between the 2.x and 3.x tree. However, there was quite a bit of good material and updates from the 3.x series.

Eventually official development stopped completely with the extremely mature CircleMUD version 3.1. The project website is still operational and contains much more information at CircleMUD

In 2020 the software license for DikuMUD was finally upgraded, though unfortunately only under the still somewhat restrictive LGPL license. This allowed the MUD community to lobby and pressure CircleMUD to also update its license in 2020. Since it is still held back by DikuMUD, its license was also limited to the same LGPL.

An unofficial fork of CircleMUD known as CWG (CircleMUD With Goodies) continued development using the original version numbers. They eventually stopped at version 3.5.

The successor to CircleMUD is considered to be tbaMUD, by The Builder's Academy, and picked up directly from version 3.5 of the CWG fork.



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  • Original Developers


  • Jeremy Elson

  • Language(s)


  • C

  • Release Year


  • 1993

  • Software License


  • LGPL (updated 2020)

  • See also

    • tbaMUD

There once was a guy who played MUDs
But the MUDs that he played were all duds
“I’ll write one,” said he.
And he brushed off his C.
And soon he played his game with his buds.

-- Background Story, CircleMUD