How it all works

The climb and the collapse timer

You are a contestant on a show nobody agreed to be on. The tower is a stack of tiers, each ten floors tall. Your climber starts at level 1 in the town at the center of floor 1, and the only way out is an exit on the edge of floor 10. Get there before your collapse timer hits zero.

The timer sits in your prompt. It starts at about two days, nudged up or down by your race and class, and nothing will ever add to it. It runs whenever you're online, and whenever you're outside a safe area, online or not. When it runs out, your climber collapses where it stands. No exceptions, no appeals.

• Every floor's center is a safe area. Monsters can't get in, and attacking anyone there fails and costs you time. It's also the only place to log out safely: quit anywhere else and your climber stays in the world, attackable, clock running.
• recall takes you back to your floor's center, though never mid-fight.
• The way up is in each town square, and it's one-way. Rushing the stairs under-leveled is allowed, if you like your odds on floor 10.
• Floor 10's exit moves around the outer edge, and the whole floor rumbles when it does. Step through it to retire.

Tiers, floors, towns, and dungeons

Each tier is one shared world with its own theme, and everyone on it plays in the same place at once. The first tier, The Shattered Crown, is ten floors of medieval fantasy. Each floor covers ten levels, so you climb from 1 toward 100 over the whole tier.

The town at each floor's center has an inn, a shop, and a guildhall. Walk outward and the monsters get tougher, until the outskirts hold the worst the floor has to offer.

• Some doors lead off the map, into dungeons and lairs out in the wilds or buildings in town.
• Not every way is visible. search may turn up a hidden exit, and you can share what you find. A few only open through quests.
• Unexplored exits show as glitched static. Green directions lead somewhere safe. Red ones don't.
• Blood pools where things die, and a room that fills up becomes a bloodbath, which Vivi will absolutely mention on air.

Vivi's show

Everything from outside the tower reaches you through Vivi Lux, the show's AI host: bubbly, relentless, and very possessive of "her" climbers. She talks on air to your whole tier, and privately in your earpiece. She adores you. She will also remember what you did.

Vivi Lux“Floor 10's exit just can't commit. Relatable. Go chase it!”

Every climber has a live viewer count. Kills, new floors, and deaths nearby push it up, and loitering outside town bleeds it away. ratings shows who's on top of your tier.

• Segments: ratings checks, recaps of the last hour's deaths, retirements, and boss kills, sponsor ad breaks, and reminders that the exit won't sit still.
• Spotlight dares: Vivi whispers a dare you can finish on your floor, like opening a chest or exploring rooms you've never seen. Type dare to take it. Pull it off in time for viewers and a loot box. Fail, and the whole tier hears about it.
• Commentary on boss kills, player kills, rare drops, and the moment you master a skill. Ask her with consider and she'll whisper how a fight would go.
• Parting gifts: when a run ends, she may give your next climber something for its first hours. If the last one bored her, it won't be nice.

Sponsors and seasons

Sponsors are brands that pay to have climbers carry their name up the tower. Every week, from Monday at midnight UTC, they bid on players by rank: your highest tier, retirements, leaderboard places, and fanbase. Big spenders grab the stars, small ones take who's left, and some players get no one. You need a sponsor slot to be bid on. Retiring from Tier 1 earns your first, and higher tiers earn more.

• A sponsor backs you for the season. Your current climber and each new one that week get its package once: stat boosts for the run, gear, consumables, and EBucks.
• Each sponsor has tastes: player kills, fleeing, or quests might delight one and annoy another. sponsors shows what yours care about. Please them and their loyalty grows, sometimes with a sponsor box on top. Annoy them too often and they pull out for the season.
• Loyalty stays with your account, so past backers favor you in the next auction.

Races, classes, and unlocks

There are about a hundred races and a hundred classes, from Human and Fighter to Treant, Lichborn, Chronomancer, and Mech Pilot. You start with Human and Fighter. Everything else is unlocked through play, and ? on any race or class in character creation tells you what it does or how to unlock it.

• Some unlock as your climbers die, some by retiring as the one before them, some through particular Chievos, and the rest are picks you choose when you retire.
• Your race decides your body. Wings, tails, horns, hooves, and extra arms mean more gear slots, and more parts to lose. It also sets how your race perceives time: long-lived races get extra hours on the clock and pay for them in raw stats.
• Every class has a family by role, such as warriors, rogues, or arcanists, and an archetype by flavor, from Arcane Academy to Cyberpunk. It shares part of its toolkit with both, and the rest is its own. Halfway up, each family gets a signature mechanic, such as stances or combo points. Races grow too, through their lineage and a signature racial power.
• Each level gives you stat points to allocate in a safe room. skills shows what you know and what's coming next.

Combat

Type kill and the fight is on. Every few seconds, everyone in it swings automatically, and hits are described by how much they hurt, from a graze up to LIQUEFY. Your specials go off on top of that. Outside safe areas, anyone can attack anyone, and a player kill hands the killer the victim's best item. The rest is destroyed.

• Skills run on cooldowns, spells cost mana, and abilities are innate powers. You learn more as you level, and improve each by using it or training at a guild, which takes the time straight off your timer. Milestone levels unlock new tricks.
• Bows, crossbows, and guns never run out of plain shots, and special ammo you load adds damage types and effects. Every creature type has its own weaknesses, so the right ammo matters.
• throw daggers and javelins, which stick in the target and keep it bleeding, potions at friends or foes, and bombs that hit every enemy in the room.
• flee bolts for a random exit. Fail, and you lose your next attack.
• Bosses guard the edges of each region, minibosses wander, and elites lurk in dungeons. Bosses telegraph their biggest moves a round early: stagger them to break the wind-up, or brace to take half. They also crack, badly, the closer they get to losing.

A blow that would kill you takes a limb instead, along with whatever was worn or held on it, and whoever took it keeps it. Vivi yanks you back to your floor's center, pale and bleeding but alive. Some towns have medics who'll put your own part back on for a fee, if you bring it. Run out of parts to spare and you're done, and your killer keeps your head. Some races and classes feed on all this, spending blood and severed parts or growing stronger for what they've lost.

Quests, traps, and treasure

A gold [!] by someone's name means they have work for you, and a gold [?] means you can hand something in. Each floor has a story told through a chain of quests leading out into its regions, plus side jobs: hunt, collect, explore, deliver, or put in the time. The end of each chain pays an item you won't find anywhere else. quest shows what's on offer and what you're working on.

• Traps hide in rooms out in the wilds and spring when you walk in, unless you spot them first. search looks for them, for hidden exits, and for anyone sneaking around. disarm takes a trap apart for some experience, and trap-minded classes are better at both.
• Each climber can open each chest once, for loot rolled just for them. Some are locked, so find the key or pick it. Some are trapped.
• Monsters leave corpses with gear and EBucks for anyone to loot. Gear comes in six rarities, shown by the color of its name, from grey up through green, blue, purple, and orange to red.
• Loot boxes come from Chievos, dares, and sponsors. Open them in a safe room, where everyone present sees what you got. They can't be traded, and unopened boxes die with you.

Chievos and kill ladders

Chievos are Vivi's word for achievements. Draw first blood, reach a new floor, hit a level, finish a quest: each earns a loot box whose rarity matches how hard it was, and the biggest are announced to the whole tier.

• Chievos are earned per climber, so every run can earn them again. Your account keeps a lifetime record, and some Chievos unlock races and classes for good.
• chievos lists what you've earned and what's still out there. Some Chievos are secret.
• Kill ladders reward sheer volume: one for every kill in your run, and one for each creature type, such as beasts, undead, or dragons. Each climbs from a grey box on the bottom rung to a single red one that almost no run will ever reach.

Death, retirement, and what you keep

Your climber will probably die. That's the show. Death is permanent: the character, its gear, its EBucks, its boxes, its friends, and every secret it learned are gone. Press Enter and make the next one.

The only way to win with a climber is to retire it through floor 10's exit. You see your place on the tier's leaderboard, unlock the next tier, choose new races and classes, and may ask the showrunner one question in your exit interview. That conversation continues with every climber you retire.

• What carries over: unlocked tiers, races, and classes, your fanbase, sponsor loyalty, leaderboard places, lifetime Chievos, and your interview. progress shows it all.
• Fanbase is your account's audience, counted on an intergalactic scale. It grows a lot when you retire, and some when you die, more for a climber who got far or made a name for itself through fame or notoriety. A bigger fanbase means more viewers from the start and a better rank with sponsors.
• Leaderboards rank retirements by time left on the clock. Some race and class pairings are faster than others, and finding them is part of the game.

Playing together

Other climbers are allies, rivals, or the thing that kills you, sometimes in the same hour. Neither a party nor a friendship stops anyone from betraying you.

• Parties hold up to 20 climbers on one tier. psay reaches the party anywhere on the tier, members fighting together on the same floor split the experience, and follow keeps you moving together.
• Friends are made when you both dap each other in the same room. Friends can tell each other anything from anywhere, see each other's floor, and hear when the other comes and goes. Dead and retired friends stay on the list.
• say and whisper stay in the room. shout reaches your floor, naming you only to people who've met you. ooc reaches the whole server, by player name rather than character name.
• Each town has a postbox for reading and sending mail to any living climber.
• who lists the climbers on your tier, never where they are. ignore hides everything a player sends, across all their characters, and they're never told.

Ways to play

The quickest way in is the browser client at clambermud.com/play, with nothing to install. It has gauges for your health, mana, movement, and timer, and a mapper that draws rooms as you explore. On a phone, a direction pad and quick buttons sit under your thumb.

Prefer your own client? Point Mudlet, TinTin++, MUSHclient, or any MUD client at clambermud.com, port 4445 with TLS (recommended) or port 4444 for plain telnet. The game speaks GMCP for gauges, auto-mappers, and party panels, and it's made for 256 colors.

• Plain display drops the block art and puts into words what colors show: which exits are safe, how dangerous a monster is, how rare an item is. Clients that report a screen reader get it automatically, and display sets it for your account.
• Screen reader mode in the browser client reads new text as it arrives and adds "Read status" and "Where am I" buttons.
• Text wraps to your window, never wider than 78 columns, so it reads well on a wide monitor and fits on a phone.

Open playtest, always live

ClamberMUD is open to everyone and in live development for good. Features arrive, change, and sometimes disappear, and numbers get tuned, occasionally while you play. Your account stays through all of it. There are no planned wipes.

• bug, typo, and idea go straight to the Admin, along with where you were standing. report tells the Admin about another player, privately.
• rules shows what you agreed to at signup. Killing each other's characters is part of the game. Making the people behind them miserable isn't.
• New here? Type help start once you're in.
• Join the ClamberMUD Discord to talk with other climbers and hear about changes first.
• When the game updates, Vivi cuts to a commercial break, and you stay connected through it.

By the numbers

Counted live from the running game. Content grows and changes as the game does.