The House of Icarus
The House of Icarus is a simple open source MUD inspired by classic early 2000s skilling MMOs like Runescape. It is a low-tech, neo-dark age, sci-fi game where edged weapons and bows are more common than computers and guns.
There is not much here yet.
Gameplay
- Type and wait skilling.
- Attack and wait combat.
- Semi-AFK and active gameplay styles.
- 600ms game ticks.
- 28 slot inventory.
- Classless. Skills level 1-99 as you use them.
- Solo friendly just like you remember from 2001. Grind and chat with friends.
- Ironman-style, slow, grind up your own gear progression. Vendors generally don’t sell craftable items.
- Non-violent ways to use combat skills with “dangerous work”.
- Discoverable safespots for chill training ranged and science.
- A detailed casino for you to waste all the credits you grind up for.
Skills
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
| Accuracy | How accurate you are with melee weapons. |
| Strength | How hard you hit with melee weapons. |
| Defense | With higher defense you are less likely to get hit. |
| Hit Points | Your HP is your maximum amount of health. |
| Ranged | Accuracy and effectiveness with using bows, guns, and thrown weapons. |
| Science | Accuracy and effectiveness using scrap for utility and combat. Almost magical! |
| Technology | Temporary togglable buffs that slowly drain your battery. Recharges at terminals. |
| Fishing | Relax, AFK, and catch some fish for easy food. |
| Mining | Relax, AFK, and mine some ore. Or do sweaty 3-tick mining to mine a lot of ore. |
| Woodcutting | The best skill. Chop trees to get wood. |
| Firemaking | Burn logs to watch this number increase. |
| Assassin | Take on jobs to slay large numbers of creatures and rivals for big rewards. |
| Hacking | Follow rumors using illegal computer skills for personal gain. |
| Thieving | Steal limitless credits and farming seeds from the rich NPCs of Vesta. |
| Scavenging | Pilfer junkyard scrap, then turn it into components for Science. |
| Farming | Grow your own food and reagents. You terraformed Vesta after all! |
| Cooking | Cook food for HP and other minor buffs with your fish and crops. |
| Smithing | Turn ore into bars. Turn bars into useful equipment and ammo! Modify weapons! |
| Crafting | Create jewelry, clothes, glass, pottery, and fine silver items. |
| Fletching | Create cheap low-tech bows, crossbows, darts, arrows, and bolts. |
| Pharmacy | Clean herbs and brew potions for temporary buffs. |
| Construction | Build a player-owned house for fast travel or to show off rare items. |
| Agility | Get more stamina and shorter wait times when AFK travelling with APS. |
Building
Install Go then
git clone https://git.historia.vg/git/thehouseoficarus
cd thehouseoficarus
go build -o thoi ./cmd/thoi
./thoi
Telnet to the port configured in config.yaml or bring up the web client.
Server Options (config.yaml)
The thoi binary checks for a file named config.yaml in $XDGCONFIGHOME/thoi or the local directory. It creates one if it’s not found.
The game is designed around 600ms ticks, but you can change the tick_length here. You can also set up telnet, SSL telnet, HTTP, and HTTPS on different ports here. For the secure options can provide a private key and certificate. Use something like certbot. If you enable HTTPS/Telnet TLS without providing certs, a self-signed cert will be generated and used for you.
AI Disclosure
The THOI game engine and tools are completely vibe coded agentically engineered written with “LLM assistance”.
LLMs do not generate any creative content (e.g. story, characters, rooms, quests). LLMs do generate example content for dev testing, so you might see that somewhere, but not in the final game. I personally prefer mediocre solo dev writing to AI filler.
License
0BSD. Do whatever you want. Have fun.