The History of this world

Xyllomer 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 (see below) 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 standing on the good side or being neutral. The importance of the guilds grew and they strongly were supported by coding activities. 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 introducing/remembering system was created which is with small changes still in place today. Also mortals today write articles for the Padernews, a world wide paper (inside Xyllomer) containing the latest news. Also mortals can configure their own items (i.e. defining the descriptions for their weapons and armours) or even design mage spells. As mortal you can buy ships or horses or you can rent hotel rooms and in very special cases mortals get the permission to build their own home. You probably already noticed the houses of some (former or still playing) mortals, for example in the city of Padorn. There is a lot more, not mentioned here.

Also you probably will notice very soon that Xyllomer has a complex weather system. In some areas the descriptions even change by the season throughout the year. The world in Xyllomer has 16 months with 22 days each. Do you know why 'AF' is added to every year (i.e. the current year in Xyllomer when I update this page is 276 AF)? The 'AF' means 'after the fire' and means the big fire that destroyed the proud city of old Padorn totally. However, in OOC (out of character) terms this big fire took place, when the mud was switched to the CD mudlib in 1992. The time in Xyllomer runs five times faster than in real life (previously this factor was set to eight).

I want to add a few words to Quests and Live Quests. There are lots of quests in Xyllomer, as I checked lately there had been more than 100 of them. Quests are special tasks and in general available for every player. You have to solve a puzzle or you need to help a npc (non player character, a living which is run by the system), free a princess or to save a kingdom or whatever. Usually you are rewarded richly and your char gains experience (and this way gets stronger). Live Quests however are something different. These are one-time and unique happenings in the world. Usually the wizards use live quests to introduce serious changes into the world, i.e. to explain why new areas appear (or vanish), new skills or guilds suddenly are available and so on. Sometimes wizards create live quests for special occasions. Do you remember the evil mage Zenidia and her adamant golem, coming to reign over Xyllomer in the year 250 AF? Well, they failed, do you have an idea why?

Xyllomer runs on an own dedicated computer. Since beginning of this year the hardware mainly consists of an AMD Duron CPU with 700 MHz and 512 MB RAM. The money used for buying this and the previous machines was donated by the mortals and wizards. We have our own computer since Feb 10^th 1996, when we switched from the previously used SPARC 1 (see above) to a PC (in those days with a Pentium 133 MHz CPU) to solve some serious speed problems. Since this time the mud uses Linux as operating system. Also in those days (actually it was in the second half of 1995) the mud was renamed from 'PaderMud' into 'Xyllomer'. As the mud was still on the SUN workstation the access to the mud was limited for mortals. Not more than 42 mortals were allowed at the same time (I have no idea why the number was set to 42, really ;-), the additional mortals had to wait in a queue until someone logged out. And in peak times there had been 10 or 20 people waiting to play! Unbelievable, right? Today we still have this queue (I think), but we never came close to the new limits with the faster hardware.

Last update by Tagor, in April 2001