Oxidus

What You Get

Oxidus is not a game in itself — it is a foundation designed to be downloaded, customized, and built into a fully realized MUD. Think of it in the same lineage as Nightmare, Dead Souls, and Lima — a comprehensive starting point that provides the systems and architecture a game needs, while leaving the creative direction to you.

Oxidus began life as a fork of LPUniversity and has since diverged into its own codebase, actively maintained and extended by gesslar. It targets FluffOS 2019+ and takes advantage of modern driver features including native GMCP support, TLS, WebSockets, HTTP client/server capabilities, and first-class async/await with promises.

Combat & Advancement

Full combat loop with hit-chance, damage pipeline, threat tracking, defence/AC, and procs. Use-based skill improvement, XP-driven levelling, and class archetypes.

Equipment & Items

Weapons, armour, and clothing with a body-part slot system. Consumables, mass-and-capacity containers, and transactional moves.

Economy

Multi-currency system with wealth tracking, transaction math, inventory-based and menu-based shops, banks, and configurable loot-value tables.

Communication

A messaging pipeline that walks the containment hierarchy, action messages with automatic verb conjugation and per-recipient pronoun handling, and system feedback in its own voice.

Boons & Curses

Buff/debuff system with class/type structure, stacking rules, expiration, and integration with attributes, vitals, and skills.

World Building

Rooms, exits, doors, terrain, zones, and spawning. Virtual areas for procedural generation. Data-driven NPCs and items via LPML files.

Persistence

Marked variables are automatically saved and restored. Daemons opt into persistence, with recursive inventory serialization.

Waiting Without Freezing

Spells with a cast time, files that take a moment to read, a web request that has to come back — async and await let them take as long as they need while everyone else keeps playing.

External Integration

GMCP, HTTP client/server, WebSocket client, Discord bot, Grapevine inter-MUD network, and MSSP.

Architecture

Oxidus is organized around a few key principles:

• Modular extensions — Features are composed through inheritable modules (EXT_*) rather than monolithic base classes.
• Standard base classes — STD_ROOM, STD_OBJECT, STD_NPC, STD_DAEMON, STD_CMD and friends provide the setup chain and lifecycle hooks.
• Simulated efuns — A library of convenience functions available globally as if they were driver built-ins.
• Data-driven content — LPML (an extended JSON5 format) lets builders define items, NPCs, and configuration without writing code.
• Daemons — Singleton services manage cross-cutting concerns: currency, signals, persistence, advancement, configuration, and more.
• Nothing waits on anything else — Most code runs straight through, the way you would expect. When something genuinely has to wait, async lets it step aside so the rest of the game carries on without it.

Getting Started

The fastest route is the published Docker image; the from-source route builds FluffOS for you through adm/dist/rebuild. Either way, the first character to log in becomes the owner.

Full instructions are in the Getting Started guide.