Nanvaent is an LPmud, running a very recent version of the MudOS driver.

Nanvaent is located on a server in London, England.

In the beginning it was running at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where all past and current gods once graduated. But a few years ago games really fell out of fashion there and we had to move.

Nanvaent then moved to the Multimedia Comms group at the University of Glasgow, running on a Sun Sparc 10 they graciously allowed us part use in. One of the main reasons for picking the University of Glasgow was that one of the gods went on to work there. He then moved on to work for another company and even though we didn't have to move, we did. Mainly to insure at least one highlord/god had physical access to the machine in case of emergency.

In 1998 the time was then right to have a fundraiser and buy our very own machine. So we did, and it was a success. We then relocated to one of the largest ISPs in the UK, where one of the highlords just happened to be the head system administrator... And that's where we are still located today.

The mud named Nanvaent was an LPmud originally started by Anjou sometime mid to late 1989. Life was tough in those days and we occasionally had to get help from Lars Pensjų himself to get things going. Anjou was quickly joined by Aragorn, who at that time ran an Abermud with no name, and Edacom. Shortly after that we were also joined by Bill, who at that time ran a mud called Vaxmud (where all the characters mentioned above played). This mud had been around forever, i.e. more or less from the time of the first recorded muds (MUD, MUDII). We quickly realised the potential of the LPmud system and converted some of Vaxmud (and its players :-) to Nanvaent. So we can trace our roots back into the white coat operators age, and the jury is still out regarding the exact starting date (or even year). This uncertainty is fast becoming a problem: Did we miss our own 20 year anniversary or not!

As of March 2004, Nanvaent runs on an AMD Athlon 2800XP based machine with 1GB of RAM and 2x ATA/100 128GB drives which are mirrored.

The operating system in use is FreeBSD, and we use things like Apache httpd, MySQL and so on.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: It obviously costs somebody money to host the game, give it Internet access, and to pay for the hardware it runs on. For the most part, this is covered by the generosity of a few individuals who run the game.

However, you can help cover these costs by visiting http://www.nanvaent.org/fund/ and making a donation - but this is entirely voluntary.

MUD /muhd/ n. [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. A class of virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding', etc.

Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in PD in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth.

Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that USENET feeds have been spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.

AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of USENET in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition. In 1991, over 50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.

The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. There is now (early 1991) a move afoot to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored.

Telnet is also the program/protocol you normally use to "log in" to a remote machine. When you telnet to a remote machine, you actually telnet to a "port" on that machine. Since this port is the same in 99.95% of all normal cases, you normally don't have to explicitly say which port to connect to. But a mud lives on such a machine, and to be able to co-exist with the normal login system of that machine the mud has to pick a non-standard port for its connections. A port is simply a number between 0 and 65536 (give or take a few), and most muds pick a number between 2000 and 8000 for various reasons.

However, Nanvaent owns the machine it's running on and to avoid all the hassle with port numbers, we're running the mud on the normal telnet port number (port 23). So all you have to do to connect is type:

telnet nanvaent.org

In WWW speak, the URL would be:

telnet://nanvaent.org

People addicted to port numbers may use port 3000, but that number is primarily just kept for backwards compatability. It does connect you to Nanvaent however. We still keep it around since that's the number we used when we didn't have our own dedicated machine, and various documentation and/or webpages still reference us using that port.

When you become more advanced in your mudding, you may want to look at a few dedicated mud clients. These typically allow you to set up automatic responses to events happening in the game, and also set up aliases so that you can do more than one action in one go. See http://aragorn.uio.no/lpmud_ftpsites.html for a decent starting point for clients.

Once you connect properly, you will see the following screen (or something similar if we redesigned it after this FAQ answer was written):

  [===--------------===] E-mail : nanvaent@nanvaent.org [===--------------===]
 
                                  /\
                                 /  \                  __
                                / /\ \                /  \
                               / /  \ \               \  /
                              / /    \ \              / /
   ____________ ____  _____  /_/_  ___\ \ ____  _____/ /____________ _________
  (___________ /    \ \___ \/    \/  \ \ \___ \/  _  \/    \__   __/__________)
      (________\  \  \/  _  \  \  \   \ \/  _  \  ___/\  \  \ \  \ _______)
          (_____\__\_/\_____/\__\_/\____/\_____/\____/ \__\_/  \_/____)
                         / /              \ \    / /
                        / /                \ \  / /
   Use 'guest' if      /  \                 \ \/ /
   you just want to    \__/                  \  /
   look around.                               \/
 
    telnet nanvaent.org                                  http://nanvaent.org/
  [===--------------===] E-mail : nanvaent@nanvaent.org [===--------------===]
 
 PLEASE use the 'bug' command to log bugs you find.
 Enter your name:
 

On the prompt above, you type in the name you want people to know you by on the mud. It is preferred that people pick something slightly Medieval to fit into the game but we allow any names as long as they are unlikely to offend anyone. As you may soon find out, all the "good" names are taken. Nanvaent has a very large player base, with several thousand players dropping by during an average month. Try to be imaginative and invent your own name, or pick a nickname you've always had. Note that names that the general population might find offensive are forbidden and will have you removed and possibly banned. Picking your favourite rude word is not funny and it's been done thousands of time before. Grow up and pick a useful name. If the name you have chosen is already taken, you will immediately notice this as the game will ask you for a password:

 Enter your name: aragorn
 Enter password:
 

Here I typed in "aragorn", and found it taken already - surprise! Just press ENTER at the password prompt and the game will disconnect you and allow you to connect again. Repeat this until you find an unused name. That will look like this:

 Enter your name: blackbeard
 Your name is not in our annals.
 Did you enter your name [blackbeard] correctly (y/n) ?
 

Answer 'y' there, and you will be asked some question to create your new character. First off, you need to decide on a password. DO NOT use a password you normally use. There are several reasons for this, one being that the mud you connect to is typically half way across the Internet and having an important password flying across the net all the time is Not A Good Idea[TM]. Secondly, some muds are bad seeds and may try to use the password you gave to gain access to your computer. There have been no incidents of this happening on Nanvaent and we believe our security system is pretty tight, but it pays to get into the habit.

When the password is decided and typed in twice, you will be asked if you are male or female. This has nothing to do with your actual gender, but decides whether your character on Nanvaent is male or female. Most people play the gender they are in real life, but some crossplay. It's up to you.

Once that is decided, you are finally in the game. On Nanvaent, this means that you have arrived in immigration. That room looks like this:

 You are standing in the Nanvaent Immigration Office where all new arrivals to
 Nanvaent are screened for suitability of admission. The walls are covered in
 numerous posters advertising things to do and places to see. Behind a large,
 high desk sits the Immigration Officer. Upon the desk you can see a copy of the
 Nanvaent High Score Table and above the desk is a large friendly looking sign.
 To the west a short corridor leads into the Tourist Office.
 There is one obvious exit : west
 A largish green box is here.
 

What you do from here on is entirely up to you. Some useful commands are who, look, examine <object>, north, south, east, west, up, down, say <something>, tell <someone> <something>, get <something>, inventory and help.

On your way, it is very important that you examine your surroundings carefully. There are hidden objects, traps, things that go bump in the night and various other elements that can only be located by being nosey and inquisitive. Read the descriptions you see carefully, and examine any objects that may be mentioned. If in doubt however, maim, kill and loot. :-)

Picking a guild is even trickier, as it may take you a while to discover which guilds are available. The Fighters guild is easy to spot, so is the Wizards. But can you find the Thieves lair, or the Foresters guild? There are other guilds as well, and the idea is that you play for a while as Adventurer and then later on decide which guild you want to join. Note that some guilds have membership restrictions - for instance, to become a Knight or a Barbarian you have to first join the Fighters guild and work your way up. The Wizards, on the other hand, may reject your application if your intelligence or wisdom are too low...

There are other commands to see who is logged on, these include levels and guilds which show you other information about the people logged on.

If you are in the same location as someone, you can use the say command to say something to everyone in that location. If you want to talk exclusively with someone, you can tell him/her something. A tell will also work even if the two of you are in widely separate locations. We have allowed this anomality since we try to promote the fact that we are a very social mud amidst all the killing and looting. There are also several "channels" that are like radio stations where everyone can pitch in. The most popular is the chat channel, where the weirdest things are said. See help channels for more information about tuning in/out channels and talking on them. Note that quest information, rude language and foreign languages are forbidden on public channels.

There are a few things you can do to cut down on what is sent to your screen. You may not be interested in some of the channels, you can turn off specific channels by typing channels <channel name> for example channels chat. If you want to turn off channels completely you could type earmuff channels, earmuffs are also available for other aspects of Nanvaent. Typing earmuffs will show you what is available. So, for example, if you wanted to turn off all soul commands you could type earmuff soul. Typing earmuff total will turn on all earmuffs which can be useful when you are writing mail or posting a message to a board.

At level 10, you are no longer considered a Newbie. This means that people within a certain range of levels can kill you.

Different guilds have different level restrictions, some requiring you to be a certain level before joining and some forcing you to complete various tasks and quests before allowing you to gain more levels.

At level 90, you can apply for creatorship. This means that if you are accepted you will become part of the staff that maintains and expands Nanvaent. Some muds allow people to apply for creatorship much earlier than Nan, but we feel that you don't become fully qualified unless you know your way around the mud and really knows what it feels like to be a player in Nanvaent. That way you also know the things that if implemented would make it even better...

At level 100, you are officially an Addict and may enter the Addicts Club once you have completed most of the quests in the land.

The syntax is: nickname <nickname> <actual name>. For example, you could nickname 'Moswen' to 'mos' by typing: nickname mos moswen. You can display your existing nicknames by typing nickname and delete them with the dnickname command.

To alias something you type alias <alias name> <whatever you want to alias it to>. So if you typed alias gc get all from corpses, you would then be able to just type gc and Nanvaent will interpret that as 'get all from corpses'.

Channels, which are discussed later, can also be reviewed by typing chistory <channel name>, or just ch for short.

If you want to be Guild Master of your guild first ask yourself why. If you want to help the guild and other guild members with your knowledge you don't have to be Guild Master to do that, and anyone is allowed to talk to Creators about ideas. If you feel you are the best person to do this for your guild then maybe you really should be the Guild Master. Try and get some support from your fellow guild members and maybe you will be elected...

Stats may also be influenced in various ways by wearing, wielding, or using magical objects you will encounter in your adventures.

Advancing itself is done in the guild you belong to - make use of the advance command. You may specify the subskill you want to invest your points into, as in advance fighting.points , or even say how many levels you wish to advance - advance magic to 90.

At this point your best choice is to use the refresh command, which will return you to level 0 and reset most things. You will keep all your aliases, nicknames and mail etc. You could also suicide your character using the suicide command, this is as bad as it sounds, it deletes everything about your character and you will no longer exist.

So, back to the question, an addict is not allowed to use a second character for the sole purpose of killing other players or stealing from other players. This does not mean they cannot kill a player. If you think an addict is acting irresponsibly then you should report him or her and let us decide.

Losing your equipment due to a game crash is an occupational hazard and outside our ability to fix. Therefore you will not get your lost XP or equipment back in those cases. It's considered a good idea to typesave after you pick up some good equipment.

The classic mistake is when you have made an alias by mistake or forgotten an old alias which conflicts with what you are trying to do. So if you are typing get all from corpses and you are getting a strange response, type alias get, this will tell you whether you have aliased get to something stupid by mistake. A common error may be typing alias get all from corpses.. if you didn't spot the mistake in that then you have probably made it yourself a few times :-) The moral of the story is always check your aliases before asking for help when something strange appears to be happening.

Nicknames can cause similar problems, see the next question.

Nanvaent is an ever changing world, things change from day to day, also many things behave in a random manner. So if a monster you kill often suddenly slaughters you don't start complaining about it as it may have been changed, or it may be different every day and you were just lucky on the previous occasions.

As a last resort report it as a bug, or talk to a creator to try and resolve the problem.

The second reason is that you have made a mistake while nicknaming the person. You may have made a nickname called alex for someone called alexander, then a new player called alex starts playing, and when you try to talk to him Nanvaent thinks you are trying to talk to alexander. Another common error is typing the wrong thing when you create the nickname, for example, typing nickname burty b will cause you some problems. You cannot use b or burty now, as b means nothing and burty points to b. The correct usage of the nickname command is nickname b burty.

So if Nanvaent tells you someone isnt logged on when you try to talk to them, type nickname <the name you tried to talk to> and see if you have made a mistake.

Every creator has their own allow list, and it's useless to shout things like 'Is Corvin on? Why am I not on your allow list?!?!?' This is a privilege immortals grant to their personal friends and a deal of trust is involved. Don't make a fool of yourself demanding to be loved or trusted - it will not work.

In the unlikely scenario where you really do not know what you have done wrong you can always log on as another character and ask a Lord if they can find out. If you are unlucky enough to be from a site where you cannot log on new characters (maybe it was your fault, so don't think its luck :) you can mail admin@nanvaent.org.

Banning is not always permanent. If you find out you were only suspended for a certain period of time, don't spend that time complaining about it, it will not help matters.

In extreme circumstances whole sites may be banned; this will usually prevent new characters to be made from that site so it shouldn't affect current players. This is a measure to stop people that find it amusing to log on numerous characters to abuse players. If your site has a new character ban and you would like a new character for serious playing then you should talk to a Lord about it.

When someone gets your goat in one way or another you have a multitude of options to make him/her stop, ranging from telling him to stop to making sure he stops playing Nanvaent. Note however, that Nanvaent is a place where role playing occurs. This means that it's perfectly normal to have a thief steal some of your stuff. It's also perfectly normal to have someone chase you through the woods with an axe chanting Heeeeeeere's Johnny! When role playing becomes harassment is when he targets you and keeps doing it over and over again, causing undue distress and aggravation. The borderline between the two is thin and not very easy to spot, so try to solve things between yourselves before alerting the management.

So-called Out Of Character harassment however is another thing altogether. Sexual harassment, verbal abuse etc are jumped upon from a great height the second we hear about it. People should come to Nanvaent to have fun, not to be harassed.

So what can you do?

We have a very advanced consent system whereby you can deny various souls from various people. See help consent in the Nanvaent Help system. Typical use is deny <player> everything. This will make sure he can't tell you things anymore. We also have earmuffs if you want to block certain channels, shouts, souls, etc. See help earmuffs in the Nanvaent Help system.

Most importantly, we have the harass command. This basically starts a timer, defaulting to a 10 minute countdown. When this timer runs, everything you see and do will be logged to a file in a secure place. This file can only be read or editied by High Lords and Gods, so we know that anything in that file is the actual untampered version of what you saw and did. The main reason for the harassment log is to allow the victim to gather proof about the harassment. More often than not in cases like this, it is the word of one player against the word of another player. Without solid proof like this, it's difficult for us to come up with a divine solution. With this kind of evidence, however, punishment is swift and hard. Do note that you can switch the logging on and off at any time, see help harass in the Nanvaent Help system. New logs will not overwrite older logs. Note also that you need to inform someone high up about the incident, just mailing Aragorn, Bill, Burty, Nirvan or any other High Lord or God will do.

See also help harassment in the Nanvaent Help system.

Harassing or abusing other players Out Of Characters. Sexual harassment, vocal abuse etc.

Trying to hack or perform denial of service attacks on Nanvaent or the machine/network it runs on.

More to come here, pquit, dest, rm, ban, suspend etc.

To send mail to someone type mail <name> from the normal Nanvaent prompt and follow the instructions. From the mail program you should just type m <name>.

For more information on the mail program type help mail, or for quick help when using the mail program type ? at the mail prompt.

There are many different boards and each has its own topics. Each Guild has a board for discussing Guild issues or chatting to other Guild members. Other boards include the tourist board which is used for general chatter. There is a Party board with announcements of upcoming parties, an applications board which should only be used if you are applying to become a Creator, etc. The name of the board should give you a clue.

Other channels include a newbie channel for asking questions or asking for help. There is a channel called emergency which should only be used in emergencies to contact Creators when something goes horribly wrong; do not use this channel unless you have to!

Creators have a variety of dedicated channels you will not have access to.

Soul commands are like emotes but are preprogrammed, see the section on communication for more details. To perform soul commands over channels you need to use the : modifier. For example, if I type chat:grin aragorn it will show up on peoples screens as CHAT:Burty grins at Aragorn and on Aragorn's screen it will show up as CHAT:Burty grins at you..

To find out details of how to use the Nanvaent POP3 Server, type help pop3 in the game. If your mailer is setup to check for mail every few minutes, please set this to quite a high number, as we dont want connections every 2 minutes.

A similar service for Nanvaent's boards will be available in the near future.

For example, I typed alias .signature Burty and the bottom of my messages look like this:

 ----
 Burty
 

The ---- is always added beforehand.

 CHAT:Burty [Mr Cool]: Hello
 

Some people seem keen on making these aliases in fancy colours. This is acceptable if they are not too long, and that you make sure the rest of the chat is in the correct colour. To do this the above alias might look like alias chat chat@ [%^RED%^Mr Cool%^RESET%^CHANNEL%^]:. Remembering that guild channels use GUILD-CHANNEL not just CHANNEL.

Sadly a lot of the time a Creator is logged on he is actually busy doing something else, like working! So don't feel bad if they don't respond to your questions immediately.

Another requirement is that you haven't behaved too badly in your time as a player. People known to be troublemakers, cheaters and the like are very unlikely candidates for creatorship, even if they suddenly claim to be reformed.

When you have reached level 90 and feel you want to try your hand at being a creator all you have to do is surf to the Nanvaent website and submit your application. The application is important as it in addition to your existing "track record" on Nanvaent is the one thing a Domain Lord looks at to determine if you are worthy a chance as a creator in their Domain. Your application should contain everything you feel is relevant. Especially programming skills, prior role playing/DM experience and/or english skills. The ideal creator is a friendly english major specialising in medieval times, with spare time spent programming and role playing. :-) Not many people fit this description and we don't really expect them to. We usually give everyone a chance to prove that they can be a valuable addition to the team.

Note that despite this, you have no RIGHT to become a creator just because you've reached level 90 or beyond. You merely have the right to apply. Nanvaent is divided into domains, and each domain has one or two Domain Lords. These lords make sure their domain creators are properly instructed and given tasks to do. A new trial creator is a lot of work for an already overworked, underpaid ($0) lord and they might not have the time to accept a new trial creator at this point in time. If you are firmly set on becoming a trial creator, however, talk to a High Lord or God and we will arrange to have some introductory information mailed to you so you can get started before you eventually get promoted.

Most of us have daytime jobs or are full time students and try our best to have a Life[TM] outside Nan. This means that the girlfriend/boyfriend sometimes wins when it's a choice between going out and sitting at home fixing up Nan. Creators have even been known to do their university assignments instead of finishing off that new area tonight. Shocking I know, but at least it allows them to code for Nan the next semester as well instead of being kicked out of the university (and losing their Internet access). In short, we're doing this at our own pace. Add to that the nasty habit creators have of leaving Nan and getting a Life[TM] just as they're starting to become skilled enough to do serious improvements to the game and you might see why Things Take Time[TM].

The explanation above also includes new guilds, new commands, new guild objects etc etc.

1. Reporting bugs, typos, loopholes etc. Use the appropriate command (bug, typo, idea, etc). If you find a particularly nasty bug that e.g. could be abused to get insane amounts of experience points then contact a Lord (or higher) as soon as you can. And don't let the fact that noone seem to fix the typos you report deter you, we will get to them sooner or later.
2. Help other players. This keeps the players off the creators' backs and allows them to spend more time improving things and less time telling players that they can't expect to have command X working as normal when they just aliased X to something completely different.
3. Reach level 90 (a prerequisite) and apply to become a creator. We need creators. Preferably someone with a good grasp of the English language, good imaginations, plenty of spare time and/or good coding skills. All of the above would be best, but we'll give most people a go. Btw, people who cheat or make a nuisance of themselves have an infinitely smaller chance of being accepted as a trial creator than those who don't, so walking the straight and narrow might be a good idea if your ambitions include becoming a creator.
4. Donating a small (or large) sum of money so we can get faster, better, bigger hardware to run Nanvaent.

Once you are satisfied that you should be able to see colour you have to tell Nanvaent that you want to see colour. This can be done with the term <type> command. Typing term on its own will give you a list of available terminal settings and tell you your current terminal type. The ones which support colour are 'ansi' and 'xterm' they differ slightly in the way they support background colours, you will have to test which is better for you. So typically you will simply have to type term ansi to enable colour on your screen.

 exits           : green     ( default - green )
 guild-channel   : magenta   ( default - magenta )
 soul            : none      ( default - none )
 say             : cyan      ( default - cyan )
 shout           : none      ( default - none )
 tell            : red       ( default - red )
 combat          : none      ( default - none )
 inform-channel  : bold      ( default - bold )
 channel         : cyan      ( default - cyan )
 

To change your colour settings you use the colours command by passing generally two arguments in the form colours <name> <colour> for example colours tell cyan. The colour argument can be the name of a colour, none or default. The name argument should be one of the setable names such as exits or tell, the full list is given when you type colours on its own.

The name argument can also be the name of a colour. For example, it is valid to type colours red blue. This would for most people be a silly thing to do, but in some cases it may be useful, such as if red did not show up well on your background, or maybe if you were colour blind, you could tailor the colours to suit you better.

Not all terminals support all colours, you can find out what all the colours look like on your screen by typing colours test.

To say something in colour you have to put a colour code in what you type. A colour code looks something like %^RED%^ so if you wanted to say hello in red you would type say %^RED%^Hello%^RESET%^. You will noice the RESET code at the end, it is best to do this otherwise on some terminals the next line will also be in red. All colour codes consist of the characters %^ followed by the name of a colour (always in uppercase) and another %^ code. It is possible to use the symbolic colours names such as tell and exits, but this wouldn't be that useful.

A full list of colours can be seen with the colours test command.

To set the size yourself you can use the rows <number> and cols <number> commands to set these.

 /def -hresize dummyname = /set wrapsize=$[columns()]
 /eval /set wrapsize=$[columns()]