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Iron Realms Releases Its First New MUD In 9 years

By ironrealms | December 13, 2018 | Comments Off on Iron Realms Releases Its First New MUD In 9 years

For Immediate Release
December 13, 2018

Starmourn is Iron Realm’s most advanced MUD and first science-fiction game.

December 13, 2018 — This Saturday, December 15, 2018, Iron Realms Entertainment is releasing Starmourn, their sixth MUD and first in a sci-fi setting. While the games industry long ago moved away from multiplayer text games, Iron Realms has remained devoted to the genre and is the only company in the world still actively creating and publishing new commercial MUDs.

“When we still actively about Starmourn in 2015, we wondered if it was crazy to invest into anew MUD given that the overall audience for that type of game is much-shrunken. However, I had always personally wanted to create a MUD with a sci-fi setting, the games and Starmourn gave us the opportunity to apply over 20 years of experience in this genre of games to an original universe we created,” said Matt Mihaly, has remained CEO of Iron Realms. “It’s also been really fun to take all that experience and push the boundaries of what the classic text MUD model can do. For instance, our starship system, which is ‘graphical’ in the sense that it uses ascii characters to represent space and what’s in it, is momentum-based and has almost an arcade-y feel to it, which is something I’ve never seen in a MUD before.”

Starmourn’s core features include the aforementioned starship system, comprised of highly-customizable ships ranging from fighters up to supercruisers, a strongly player-driven economy where players are responsible for sourcing raw materials, processing them, and manufacturing a whole range of necessary goods, a hacking system unlike anything in other MUDs,an emphasis on a rich, detailed world, five unique character classes (more coming!) with the same PvP depth that Iron Realms players have come to expect,twelve unique races, player-governed factions, and over 1000 space zones to explore filled with planets, suns, asteroids, moons, and much more.

Release Date

Starmourn has been in closed beta testing for the last month, updating based on user feedback. It’s scheduled for release this Saturday, December 15th at 2PM PST. Iron Realms Entertainment has a proprietary, cross platform client allowing users to play Starmourn directly from their browser on any platform, including iOS and Android. Users will be able to play at http://play.starmourn.com this Saturday.

Founded in 1998, Iron Realms Entertainment is the worldwide leader in MUDs and has led the way in free-to-play games for over 20 years. IRE has four other MUDs available at https://www.ironrealms.com.

For more information, press only:

  • Jeremy Saunders
  • jeremy@ironrealms.com

For more information on Starmourn:

Starmourn press kit:

More Beta Invites!

By Tecton | November 26, 2018 |

We’ve just launched another wave of closed beta invites, so check your inbox to see if you were one of the lucky few!

Starmourn Trailer!

By matt | November 1, 2018 |

We made a little trailer for Starmourn, for you guys to enjoy and share with your friends. Enjoy!



Beta time!

By Tecton | October 17, 2018 |

I’m sure you have been waiting with bated breath for this day! We’re pleased to announce that Starmourn will be going into beta testing this November! We’ll be running a closed beta for a couple of weeks, and barring any major issues(*), we’ll open it up to everyone mid-December!

Can’t wait for open beta? Neither can we! So we’re going to run a contest for invites to the closed beta over on the Starmourn forums – to enter, all you have to do is post in the contest thread with what race/class combination you’re most excited about playing. We’ll draw a handful of players to join us in the first taste of Iron Realms’ first Sci-fi game.

While we will be doing a player wipe between closed and open beta, those who participate in the closed beta will be gifted 100 credits on their final character once we hit open beta.

The contest starts today and will run until November 12th, so head over to the Starmourn forums and enter today.

  • One entry per person please – multiple entries will result in disqualification.
  • Applicants will need to be 18 or older at the time of the drawing, for legal purposes.

(*) This is a possibility – we’ll do our best to not delay the opening, but it could happen.

Please submit your entries on the FORUMS, not as comments on this news article!

An Update and Admin Commands

By matt | September 13, 2018 |

Update

We continue to steadily move towards release. Currently, there’s a lot of usability work going on as internal playtesting finds things that are troublesome, frustrating, or confusing. For instance, the ship system needed some streamlining as it was pretty unwieldy. Frankly, it’s still a little unwieldy, due to the fact that it’s pretty complicated, but I’m fairly confident that the min-maxers among you are going to love figuring out how you want to equip your ships, and others will follow your lead as you find good sets of options.

On the building side, the focus right now is on the main questline, which is quite a lot of work, but hopefully worth it – I think it’ll be interesting to see how you guys react to one of our games having that as a feature.

Admin Commands

As we work our way towards release, I thought some of you might be interested in seeing some of how we admin the game behind the scenes. This by no means constitutes everything, but does probably give you a flavor of how varied and broad the range of things is that we have to build admin interfaces for.

First, a glimpse of part of the top-level ADMIN command, which is the root verb for a range of things. Many things aren’t under this command for various reasons (compatibility with the shared backend our games have, etc), but this should give you an idea. These are all two-word root verbs for sets of actual commands. 

And here’s what some of the actual commands under those two word root  verbs look like (sorry about the small text in this one). You can see the armor interface, the space template interface, and the celestial body interface. 

Huge lore update around the Song Dominion and the Celestine Ascendancy

By matt | August 15, 2018 |

I just finished putting up our biggest lore update to date – all about the story of Martias Arrarax and Kimera Santuren and how the Celestines freed themselves from corporate rule and how they govern themselves now. Read about it all here!

I also updated the Song Dominion page with a bunch of info about how their current form of quasi-dictatorial government works and how it evolved!

Think we're pretty cool? Tell your friends!