Last Outpost

The Grasslands are just outside the north gate at the Last Outpost. It’s a rectangle 10 spaces tall and 11 spaces wide. The Cart Path runs diagonally from Outside the Gate in the SW corner to the middle of the northern boundary. There is a Sod House in the NE quadrant and a stand of trees with a clearing in the NW quadrant. There is a well and a safe room (called “an altar”) in the middle of that stand of trees. Caution: don’t confuse that with The Woods which are further west.

Happy Hunting!

When I logged on today some very friendly person of very small rank was dying regularly. Apparently, this person was in the habit of saying “Hi” to everyone and this brought trouble.

In Last Outpost, as in many MUDs, the common commands are shortened to as few as one letter and frequently two. Guess which word “hit” gets shortened to! Yup. Hi. The problem comes if you forget to say hi and instead just type “hi guard.” Then you find yourself on the wrong side of the law in town.

In my line of work, I find a lot of interesting items. My bag can only hold so much so I have to periodically dispose of the goods. That makes room in my bag for other interesting things and gives me money to spend on the necessities of life in the MUD. So shops are my economic lifeline. They provide a way to buy and sell stuff. I might need to buy food, or a healing potion. I may need to sell off unwanted armor, weapons, or loot.
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Life in the MUD is not without time. Every so often there’s “a tick of the clock” and anything that is based on time is updated. For warriors like me, that means I heal up a bit and gain my movement points back some. It means that anything I’m fighting has also healed a little. It means I’m a little closer to being hungry or thirsty, and it means that the area I’m in might reset itself — called a re-pop for re-population.
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Three things govern your ability to operate in the environment — hit points, mana level, and movement points. If you’re new to this kind of game, these three things need some explanation. Hits are a measure of health. Mana is a measure of your spell casting ability. Movement is a limitation on how far you can walk before resting.
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The beginning of the game is where you lay the foundation for the way you want to play the game. In Last Outpost, you get choice of Race and Class when you create a new character. You also get to pick the sequence your characteristics will be ordered. I’m no expert in this, but I can at least explain what’s happening when you first log in.
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Now that you’re in there, what do you do? Most people spend too much time floundering about when the first steps, like the opening moves in a chess game, are pretty standard. The goal is to advance your character and you do that by learning and earning.

Mostly you’ll wonder, “Now what?”
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Legend
W - Warrior Guild
M - Mage Guild
C - Cleric Guild
T - Thief Guild

A - Armory
B - Bank
G - Grocery
P - Potions
S - Staffs and Spells
W - Weaponry

The red square is Town Square, a source of water and a safe haven.

The Gate is the exit from town and opens onto a Cart Path thru the Grasslands.

To leave the game after playing, go to the Last Resort Inn (marked Rent). The reception area is on the upper floor.

When you play in the MUD, it gets kinda messy. You can use a simple communications terminal client (like telnet) but what you type soon gets confused with the action going on in the screen and it becomes very awkward, very fast. The action doesn’t wait for you to finish typing, so having a more robust tool for communicating is a Very Good Thing.

This is probably the most difficult part of getting into the game. The clients are not very friendly to set up and use but we’re here to help you get started. Many of us use TinyFugue (link in the sidebar) but any of the tools you find if you look up “mud clients” in Google would work. TF works on windows PCs using readily available free downloads and compiles cleanly from source on Linux machines and Macs. Leave me a comment about how well it works (or not) for you.

Normally, the adventure begins at the beginning but in our case, we join the slay-in-progress. Mostly it’s because we didn’t know what we were getting into when we started and it’s gotten out of control. The purpose of this space is to be a combination diary, instruction manual, and repository of the adventures of a band of people who are waging the battle to reclaim The Last Outpost.

We invite you to join us.