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The History of this worldXyllomer has started some years ago (the exact day is unknown today, it probably was in 1990) as 'PaderMud' with a standard 2.4.5 mudlib and some people interested in experimenting with a mud. At that time, there had not been many changes to the basic mudlib. For sure the people driving the mud mostly had a technical view on it. In 1992 Data and Frederick decided to move on and switched to the CD mudlib and driver. This mudlib mainly was developed for the mud "Genesis" in Sweden. A few people began to work on this new lib and the size of the mud increased. Time passed by and most of the wizards from the old mud moved on. 2 new Arches, Astradyne and Dimitri, were chosen from the ranks of the Wizards. After Data, the current Keeper, left Paderborn University Astradyne became the Keeper of PaderMud. He became the key person for the further development of this mud. A few month later PaderMud had to move to a SUN sparcstation 1 and some serious speed problems appeared. After several greuling months dealing with really bad lag the wizards decided to clean up the mud and start over with another driver. In september 1993 Sardane and Astradyne started to work out an auto object for the DGD (Dworkin's Generic Driver). Afterwards, the Arches started to optimise the mudlib and some incompatible events occured. Some Lords and Wizards left the mud and large areas like Avalon or the old domain of Lake vanished forever. However PaderMud steadily grew again quickly in the following months. A lot of new wizards took the chance to develop new areas and to put their own ideas into code. New domains were created from scratch, like Atlantis, Clouds, Dune or Tortoise. The domain of Lake was recreated shortly afterwards and a year later the jungle of Yucatan was discovered for the first time. The complexity of the world grew quickly. Somtimes this complexity leads to strange situations, for example when mortals discover a combination of independent skills or specials which then turn out to be extremely powerful. One of the early highlights was the darkness spell of the mages. The wizard responsible for the mages in those early days always was in need for new spells. As there was a "light" spell available, a very useful spell for the mages to create light in total darkness, within a few minutes an additional spell "darkness" was created. 'Well, without much work now my mages have an additional spell and it is only logical that if you can create light you can create darkness, too', this wizard thought, 'although it is not really of any use in the game'. Within a few days the mages turned into the most fierceful fighters in the world. Now you know why each monster or NPC in Xyllomer has a general knowledge in the blindfighting skill today. There are many more anecdotes of course. Sometimes mortals found out very creative ways to exploit bugs. You all now the powerful creatures of the mages, originally they had been that powerful that they even could grant experience points. Or the magical way of money growth when throwing coins at each other in a very special way. Some serious bugs got fixed before they got exploited, like the possibility for mortals to promote themselves to wizardhood (without need of any wizards at all). Other severe security leaks got exploited, like the wizard that obtained root permissions and stole the whole mud by copying it. This was possible by a very inconspicuous item which all of you know, the torch mortals get as a gift of the wizards when logging into the world at night. In the first years the players focused mainly on getting their chars stronger. The most important amusement was to solve quests (there are more than 100 of them) and to kill monsters. However the wizards attempted to turn the mud from a "hack'n slay" into a roleplay driven mud. The idea behind this was that the players should spend more time on interacting with (or even against) each other. Supporting this new guilds, especially evil ones, got created, like the Necromancers or the Priests of Huitzilopochtli. Until this time the main guilds had been the Satais, the Priests of Rokoon and the Atlantis Magicians. The importance of the guilds grew and they strongly were supported by coding support. Until today normally every guild has a guildwizard assigned which mainly takes care of a single guild only. Additional guilds emerged like the Psionics or the Warshrikes. The mortals got additional possibilities to form the world by themselves. One important thing to name is the judge system, which enables the mortals to select their own way of justice. In this period also a new and very flexible ntroducing/remembering system was created which is still in place today.
In the second half of the year 1995 the wizards decided to transfer the organization of this world to a new founded club. This club has to provide an internet access and a computer so that the work of many mortals and wizards to improve this world won't be lost if Astradyne wouldn't have the time to run Xyllomer in the future. 'Padermud' was renamed into 'Xyllomer'. At the end of November Astradyne got the permission to place an own computer into the University of Paderborn and at the beginning of December the club started collecting donations. Within 6 weeks the mortals and wizards donated over 6500 DM (around 4600 US$ in those days) for a new machine. On Feb 10th 1996 the mud moved to our own machine. This machine was equipped with a Pentium 133 processor with 64 megs of RAM and a 2 GB harddisk. Of course it was much faster than the previously used Sparc 1 and since this time Xyllomer runs on a linux environment. After nearly two years Xyllomer started to fill the memory and disc of the server as it grew. On November 21st 1997 the computer was upgraded to a AMD K6/200 and the memory was upgraded to 128 MB.
With the beginning of the new millenium (January 2001) again the hardware of the mud was upgraded. It currently consists of an AMD Duron 700 with 512 MB Ram.
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