zMUD and CMUD Setup for Icesus

zMUD and CMUD are Zugg Software's Windows MUD clients. Both are discontinued and neither has been updated in years, but plenty of players still run them, and Icesus supports them deliberately rather than by accident: the server recognises both by name, drops to a colour palette they can render, and rewrites text they cannot display into plain ASCII before it reaches you. This guide covers connecting, what the server changes on your behalf, and when it is worth moving on.

Connection Settings

Connecting

1. Create a new session or character.
2. Host: icesus.org. Port: 4000.
3. Leave MXP and MSP off. Icesus does not use them, and zMUD's MXP parser will occasionally eat text that merely looks like markup.
4. Connect.

What Icesus Changes for You

Icesus keeps a table mapping terminal types to colour palettes. Modern clients are handed a 256-colour palette. zmud and cmud are mapped to the 16-colour ANSI palette instead, because the 256-colour escape sequences these clients receive are rendered as literal text rather than as colour.

The server also runs outgoing text through an ASCII transliteration table for these clients. Finnish characters become their nearest ASCII equivalents, and characters that cannot be represented at all — box-drawing, emoji, zero-width marks — are converted or stripped rather than sent as bytes your client will render as mojibake. This is the same path used by the screen-reader-friendly ansi-no-utf8 terminal type.

The practical effect: maps, tables and item names stay readable instead of dissolving into question marks.

Confirm the Server Sees You Correctly

Autodetection is normally right, but zMUD and CMUD both report themselves inconsistently depending on version, and some builds identify as gmud. Check with:

term

That reports the emulation in use, whether autodetection is on, the detected client name and version, GMCP status, TLS status and your screen size. If the emulation is wrong, set it by hand:

term zmud

or

term cmud

Setting it explicitly turns off autodetection for that setting, so it will stick across sessions.

Screen Width

These clients do not always negotiate window size, which is how you end up with maps wrapping in the middle. Tell the server directly:

term 100x40

Use your real terminal dimensions. Anything wider than your window will wrap; anything narrower wastes space.

Finnish Characters

You will not get ä, ö and å rendered properly on either client — that is a client limitation, not a server one, and it is why the transliteration table exists. What you will get is a, o and a in their place, consistently, instead of a different pair of garbage characters each time.

If Finnish characters matter to you, that is the strongest single reason to move to Mudlet or the browser client, both of which handle them natively.

Common First Problems

• Escape sequences printed as visible text (something like [38;5;114m). The server thinks you can handle 256 colours. Run term zmud or term cmud.
• Maps and tables wrap badly. Set the width explicitly with term 100x40.
• Random text disappearing. Turn MXP off. zMUD's parser treats angle brackets in ordinary game output as markup.
• Connection drops on idle. Neither client sends keepalives reliably. Icesus does not idle you out quickly, but a home router might; a trigger that sends a blank line every few minutes is the usual workaround.
• CMUD refuses to start, licence error. Zugg Software has shut down and the licence server with it. There is no fix from our end.

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