How to Play

meshMUD is a multiplayer text adventure that runs over Meshtastic — a long-range radio mesh network. There is no internet connection, no app store, no account creation. You play by sending short text messages from your Meshtastic node. The game responds. Everything happens in 150 characters or less.

It plays like the BBS door games of the early '90s — Legend of the Red Dragon, TradeWars 2002 — adapted for radio. Short daily sessions. Asynchronous multiplayer. A shared world where you see evidence of other players without needing to be online at the same time. A dungeon that resets every 30 days.

You don't need to be a gamer. You don't need to be fast. You need a Meshtastic radio and five minutes.

If your mesh network is running meshMUD, the game server listens for direct messages from any node. Send it a DM and it responds. That's it.

Three stats govern everything: POW (offense), DEF (survivability), and SPD (evasion, initiative, spellcasting). Each class leans into one. You earn 2 stat points per level to allocate however you want — that's where your build takes shape.

A session takes five to fifteen minutes. You get 12 dungeon actions per day — enough to explore a few rooms, fight a few monsters, and make progress without burning out. Town actions are always free.

The tavern is the one room that never changes. Epochs wipe the dungeon, reshuffle everything, reshape the world — but The Last Ember stays. Same bar. Same people. Same lanterns that burn without oil and nobody questions anymore.

Four people live here. They remember you across every wipe.

Four floors. Each one deeper, harder, and stranger than the last. Monsters get meaner. Secrets get subtler. The rooms change every epoch but the structure holds — floor one is where you learn, floor four is where legends are made.

You carry three pieces of gear: a weapon, armor, and a trinket. The trinket is the wildcard — it might grant a passive ability, boost an unexpected stat, or do something no other slot can. Six tiers of gear across the dungeon. The best stuff doesn't come from shops.

meshMUD is asynchronous multiplayer. You don't need to be online at the same time as anyone else. You see other players through what they leave behind — messages scratched on dungeon walls, bounty progress that wasn't there yesterday, broadcasts announcing who found what and who fell where.

There is no PvP. All competition runs through leaderboards, bounty races, and endgame objectives. On a small mesh network where everyone knows each other, cooperation is the game.

Every 30 days, the dungeon resets. New rooms, new monsters, new secrets, new narrative. Your character keeps their name and their history, but gear and gold start fresh. Each epoch has an endgame mode — a shared objective the whole server works toward. On day 30, players vote on the next epoch's mode.

On day 15, the Breach opens — a surprise mini-zone between floors two and three with its own challenge, its own loot, and its own secrets. You don't know what's inside until it opens.

Twenty secrets hide in the dungeon each epoch. Some are behind walls that need a strong arm to break. Some are puzzles spread across multiple rooms. Some are hidden in things Whisper says that nobody thinks to write down. Finding them isn't required — but every secret you uncover gives a real mechanical advantage, and some of them benefit the entire server.

Read the room descriptions carefully. The dungeon tells you where its secrets are. It just doesn't tell you plainly.

Every command fits in a short message. Most have single-letter shortcuts. New commands unlock as you level up — the game teaches you as you go.