Gammon Forum

I'll describe here what I normally do when using MUSHclient for the first time on a new PC. After installing MUSHclient, and executing it, we get a few "welcome" screens, which we can dismiss. We then see something like this:

We can see the three "button bars", one above the other. One has the normal "new document", "open", "save" icons, and so on. The next has "world-related" activites (such as logging, connecting, and so on). The third one (with the numbers on it) is for quickly switching to worlds if you have more than one open at once.

Let's reduce some screen clutter by moving the second next to the first, and move the "multiple world" one over to the right, like this:

Once we have done that, the screen looks less cluttered:

Time to connect to our MUD. The quickest and easiest way is to use the Connection menu and select Quick Connect:

Fill in the name of the MUD, and the two most important parts: the MUD IP address (name or dotted number) and the MUD port number. These can be found on the MUD home page:

Hit OK and then you will be connected:

The name you chose in the Quick Connect box now becomes the local name (this appears on the top of the world window, and will be the suggested name to save the world file as). The upper (large) part of the window is the "output" window, which shows messages from the MUD. The smaller window at the bottom (white box) is where you type commands. Commands are not processed until you hit <Enter> so you can backspace and make corrections (and copy and paste) until then.

If you hover the mouse over any line for a few seconds a yellow box will pop up showing when that line arrived, which can be useful for seeing when someone sent you a Tell, for example.

If you aren't sure what name to use, you can use use the Generate Character Name utility to make a random name for you:

You may be asked for the location of a "names.txt" file - this is used to generate the name. Find that in your MUSHclient installation directory:

A suggested name is then shown. Click "Try again" until you see one you like, then click Copy to copy it to the clipboard.

You can then complete the process of connecting to your MUD. At this stage it is a good idea to tell MUSHclient to remember your character name (and optionally, your password) to make logging in faster next time.

To do this, open the main World Configuration dialog. Pressing Alt+Enter is a quick way of doing this:

The world configuration looks like below. It is broken up into sub-screens. The first one has the world name and IP address.

Click on "Connecting" on the left to move to the screen for the character name:

Here you can enter your character's name, and password if you like. To make it automatically connect next time choose an appropriate connection method from the drop-down box. For Diku-style MUDs you can select Diku-style. For more complex connection methods leave the drop-down box as "No auto-connect" but fill in what you want sent in the big box underneath (eg. you might have to give an account name first).

Once you have finished click OK to close the world configuration. This is a good time to save your setup, so that next time, MUSHclient will know your worlds's name, IP address, port, character name, and password:

Now you can enjoy playing your MUD! I will describe in other posts how to set up aliases, triggers, macros and so on.