As of current (July 2019) the MUD are fairly new and rapidly growing, usually seen 2-3 new players everyday with players fluctuate from 0-15 on peek hours.

<> Game Mechanics:

*Character progression: are levels and skills based system. You gain 1 skill point everytime you level up for a total of 100 skill points. These points can be spend to mix and match however you want with 12 different skills allows you ultimate freedom in character building. Ability are specials you can use while Skill gives you new abilities and increase their performace. Each skill have a cap of 20, after certain ranks in skill you gain a new ability, at rank 20 you gain the signature ability for that skill.

*The combat: are Balance based. After you attack or use ability you will become Unbalanced (cooldown) and cannot do anything else until you are Balanced again. Unbalanced time are usually between 1-5 seconds depends on your weapon type or character build. The pace of combat are fast enough so you never get bored and slow enough to allows human interaction.

*Balance of builds: (Almost) Perfectly balanced as all things should be. A common problem all RPG game must face and they are doing a very good job at it. "What are the worst build?" are our inside joke because there are no such thing, all builds are playable so it all come down to which one do you like instead of which one are most powerful.

<> Feature sets:

*Detailed world: Rooms description are detaily described, writing are great, a lot of interactive contents in the game and minimal typos.

*Immersion and Roleplay: are very encouraged but not enforced. All game contents are designed and polished to promote roleplay and immersion, there are world chat channel for OOC while everything else are IC.

*Guilds: There are 4 guilds allows you to further customize your character with general theme of Wizard, Druid, Assassin, Army. This doesn't mean you cannot play a wizard in Army or Assassin, or play an assassin in Wizard or Army, nothing are restricted and they are all designed to cater for all playstyle/build. Beside from abilities you gain from guild, they are also main Roleplay platform with guild title can only be gain through roleplay, those titles are purely bragging rights and have zero practical impact.

*Craft: are customized and lite system currently, with plans to expand it further in future. For now you won't found advanced recipe requires 20 different parts and dozens of each parts to craft an epic item, but more like foraging components to brew consumable potion, color mix for scribing spell scrolls etc

*Exploration: Go hand in hand with your character progression, you will never get bored with a bunch of different dungeons with secrets and lores for each of them and a real boss fight in the end, not just a bigger monster.

*Quest: Prepare for the Quest-aholic syndrome with over 1000 quests, some belong to a questline, most are kill/collect/find items quest. Best thing? They are not enforced! and rewards boost your character progression a lot.

*Grind: There are endless grind, but skill points cap are lv100. Take about 1-2 months if you are active to reach lv100. That to me are good grind:reward ratio and I enjoy it.

*Standardized UI: Near zero weird syntaxes because everything are hinted, standardized to waste you zero time to figure out the right combination of letters while playing RPG. All important info such as room name/exits, NPCs, quest, items are all colored. If you have tendency to play on mobile, worry not for Asteria are mobile friendly! With Blowtorch and MUDRammer you can play this MUD almost as good as PC client, no extensive scripts are required.

<> The Community:

*Staffs: are very friendly, keen on players inputs and allows players to develop the game along side with them through ideas. Several of my ideas has already been implemented. Within 2.5 years 2 devs built a MUD with ~15000 rooms and expanding, featuring polished contents and in-depth mechanics are definitely an impressive feat for me. All game mechanic are transparent so there are close to none differences in this regard between experienced and new players. If you don't know something, ask!

*Players: Very friendly and helpful towards newplayers, most are very keen on roleplay.

<> Downside:

All in all, the biggest downside is that the game is still in development, as much as devs may try, 2 persons can only get you so far, there are much rooms to grow and your ideas are important! Asteria also lack map so only way to know your way around is to get throroughly lost several times, luckily home recall are common here. lol

I've got hooked on the game for 2 weeks so there are a lot of praise as you can see but I tried to make this as close to what I experienced as possible. Thank you for spending your time and read my long review, hope you enjoy it and give the game a try! :)

I can’t remember the last time I was truly “hooked” on a MUD, but it was probably 10+ years ago. I was fairly involved in one of the various IRE games, where I met the person who would become my best friend in both virtual worlds and the real one.

In time, we grew older and moved on to other games. He has since passed, and I heavily associate my loving memory of him with MUDs. Perhaps this is why I’ve never felt quite “at home” again in any of the wonderful lands of text-only adventure that I’ve played since.

That is… until now. I semi-recently discovered Asteria, which I fully believe would have had my friend’s stamp of approval. Today I would like to present to you a review of this world, and while my general conclusion is likely already clear—it’s good, go try it—I will be attempting to temporarily shed my “nostalgia goggles” to give you a fair and honest assessment of this game.

I would also like to note that, other than my in-game character, I have no personal, public, or financial associations with Asteria (the latter of which would be impossible anyway as the game is free). I’m putting this disclaimer here because, quite frankly, this is a very positive review. What can I say? I love the game.

Let’s start by taking a look at the world and the people behind it:

A Two-Man Vision: Introducing the World of Asteria

Asteria has been developed by only two people. If memory serves correctly, I believe they started working together on the project in 2015. You have Greg, the coder, and Arcades, the writer and builder. Considering the size and scope of Asteria, what these two people have managed to pull together in such a short amount of time is very, very impressive.

The IRE influences are obvious but not overbearing; Asteria presents itself not as a clone but as a distillation of ideas from many different MUDs. Despite being just a baby in MUD-years (beta ended in 2018) this results in a game that feels polished far beyond its years. I believe that the staff have managed to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff and in doing so have created a game that just feels genuinely fun to play.

Asteria is a high fantasy/medieval setting and most of the usual tropes thereof are present: newbies begin their lives in a peaceful village of Half-Elves where they can almost immediately begin slaughtering the local wildlife for experience points. There’s a city of Elves who study magic, a “bad” city with a corrupt and arguably totalitarian military, and a band of shamanistic wanderers and forest-dwellers without allegiances to anyone.

That is, of course, a gross oversimplification. Despite the tropes, nothing feels terribly cookie-cutter, thanks to the substantial amount of lore-building that has already been done. For example, one of my favorite in-game books tells the rich origin story of the three original founders of Asteria’s version of the mafia—a family of vampires, liches, thieves, and other ne’er-do-wells. There are many of such books already in the game, and the staff will happily publish any lore-friendly books players wish to submit.

Which brings me to my next topic...

Staff & Playerbase

The levels of staff involvement, professionalism, and perhaps most importantly passion are off the charts. Arcades and Greg clearly care not only a great deal about the world that they’ve created, but the people living in it. Unlike so many other MUDs, I haven’t seen an ounce of favoritism, drama, or infighting. From what I’ve seen thus far, Asteria appears to be a level playing field for everyone.

Since I started, the playerbase has shown signs of growth. Usually I see 5-10 people online at a time, and I believe that if Asteria gets enough exposure, this number will only continue to grow. The playerbase is generally respectful, willing to help new players, and groups are starting to form more and more often, which has been an absolute blast.

Roleplaying: Highly Encouraged, Never Required

Asteria is a roleplaying encouraged MUD. This means that while you don’t have to roleplay, you are encouraged to do so outside of the general OOC chat channel. Nearly all other players I’ve encountered have been willing to roleplay, even if it’s just a simple interaction asking where to find a certain shop or quest-giver—no long speeches and overly-detailed emotes required.

Aside from just being fun, roleplay can gain characters certain cosmetic/fun benefits. For example, does your character have a reason to have a unique sword? The staff are willing to put it in the game for you, including with unique attack messages and other fun things. Note that items of this nature aren’t better statistically than other level-appropriate items that might be found in the game by non-roleplayers. It’s just there to add fun and a little more richness to the world.

The staff recently brought on a volunteer player to act as RP coordinator. This person is there to help facilitate player-ran roleplaying events, with all the fun stuff like global messages/narration seen by everyone online, animating NPCs, and so on.

As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that Arcades and Greg have intended Asteria to be shaped just as much by the playerbase as it has by them. At the time of this writing, certain things have only vague or little amounts of information available—such as the inner workings of a guild, or the detailed history of a city. This is on purpose: players are encouraged to craft these histories, cultures, and practices themselves.

Races & Guilds

Asteria has nine playable races, all of which you’re likely familiar with, and all of which are available at the time of character creation. You can read about the Asterian races on the wiki. (Side note: I asked Greg and a “real” website is planned).

There are four guilds in the game, which you can also read about on the wiki. None of the guilds are race-locked and all different styles of play can find viability in each of the guilds (though of course magic-only users will lean toward the University of Arcana and melee-only users will lean toward the Army of Rhojidan).

Each guild is planned to have a player Guildmaster to help craft the lore/culture of the guild and assist in coordinating RP events. At the time of this writing, only one GM slot has been filled at the University of Arcana (by me, actually, so if you like to sling spells come and say hi to Astrum in-game). As I understand it, the ultimate goal is to have the player GMs interact with the RP coordinator to create exciting stories that keep people involved and invested in their character’s personal storyline, city, guild, etc. Again, this isn’t required.

Crafting & Skills

Crafting is possible in Asteria and what you can do is determined by the guild that you join. Players have access to three different kinds: scribing, alchemy, and ritual tattooing. Scribing allows spellcasters to create scrolls that can be read by themselves or others at a later time to temporarily learn how to cast all but the most powerful spells. Alchemy is for potion making, and tattoos offer little stat-boosts or abilities quite similar to what you might have seen in the IRE games (except these tattoos don’t fade).

If you’re looking for a deep crafting system with a ton of things to make and hundreds of different ingredients to mix and match, you won’t (currently) find that in Asteria. I would call the current crafts available “robust but simple.” As to whether this is good or bad is likely a matter of personal preference.

Skills, on the other hand, you will find a lot of. Since Asteria is classless, you’re given complete freedom to mix and match whatever skills you want. While there are far too many skills to discuss in detail, I can say quite confidently that if you want to create, say, a “paladin” style Dwarven warrior who blends healing magic with the might of his axe, you can do that. Or a dual-wielding, backstabbing “rogue” with a penchant for theft. Or an Elven “ranger” who’s great with a bow and has a couple of animal companions. Or a “glass cannon” magic user hurling out fireballs the size of a house (that’s me).

I could go on and on. Needless to say, the classless skill system is, in my opinion, one of the most fun aspects of the game. Furthermore, you’re never truly “locked in” to your decisions. Until level 30, players can reset their skills for free. After level 30, players have to use a special potion and pay for training again—so while it would certainly lighten your character’s coinpurse, you can always redo your build if you’re truly displeased with it. As far as I know, the only permanent decisions in the game are your choice of race and guild.

The Quests (So Many Quests)

I’ll just put it this way: if you like to do quests in MUDs, Asteria will pretty much be heaven for you. I believe at the time of this writing there are somewhere around 1,000 quests in the game. Some of them are pretty much what you would expect: “kill 20 of these monsters here” and “bring me 5 of these widgets”.

However, and this is a big however, at least for me, some of the quest chains are really, really fun and well written. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but I will say that around level 30 players can start a quest chain that involves the disappearance of a certain NPC. Personally, I found the storyline riveting and I was glued to my chair well past the point at which I should have gone to bed.

That’s just one of many examples of great quest writing in the game. There are a few other ones that I’ve done that really stand out to me, but as tempting as it is to start talking about how cool this was or wow that surprised me, I genuinely don’t want to spoil anything so that people can have as much fun as I did “going in blind.”

Wrapping Things Up

So, this has been a crazy long review. Here’s the bottom line: if you’ve ever wanted to “get in on the ground floor” of something great, all I can say is that now is your chance to do so with Asteria.

I really hope you come and join us. If you do, say hi to Astrum. I’m usually hiding out somewhere in the University of Arcana, or doing quests, or brewing up potions, or out monster hunting… because I’m finally home again.

When I first logged into Asteria it was because of the note that it was in Beta and I seek out Beta muds because my favorite thing to do is Build. While that wasn't an opportunity available, I was amazed by the feeling of nostalgia that this mud brought back.

I am an old soul so nostalgia is a HUGE thing for me and if you're as old as I am and remember the olden day Muds this is definitely a place to check out.

If you are newer to the Mud universe, I also DEFINITELY suggest giving this Mud a try. The delivery of the battle system, quest system and skill system is unique and after you play for even an a half hour, you will see why I am raving about it.

Often times you can be left feeling like even though a Mud is running and asking for new players, the people in control or who own it care very little for making anything new or even trying to give you something unique because of the age of Muds and how much of a niche Muds are. And if they care there are often so many restrictions and outdated limitations that cause players to choose a totally of 3 out of 12 offered races because their stats are the best or the design of the skill system forces players to level-sit or quest-sit at low levels. I get very sad when a Mud doesn't want to create anything new for its players just because of the age of Muds and how niche the genre is.

Asteria feels like the opposite, for me at least. I can feel the passion and care that the Immortals and Owner place into their work and how much they have listened and taken into account, all the player feedback over the decades to offer you the way to play how YOU want to play. I no longer feel the pressure of making sure my character has perfectly picked the correct stats or the perfect race or skills in the right order because you can redo it all at any time! This gives you ultimate control over the progression of your character and the style and feel of fighting you desire.

Come say hi and lets make this adventure as grand as we can!

I love this mud. The mechanics are great and getting better all the time. Greg and Arcades have put a ton of work into this and it shows. I am really looking forward to the growth of the player base as this mud is new and still undiscovered. If you want someone to play with just look for any character that starts with Bel.