June 1997 Update

Below are some of the most recent major changes on SWmud:

New shuttles are operational throughout the mud universe. They only cost 100 credits per trip. Cabs are now much more expensive than before. This in an attempt to discourage players from using cabs so much since we feel shuttles are more realistic for SW, as the only example of a person buying transport to another planet is with Obi-Wan and Luke trying to get to Alderaan, and Han charged them more than a ship would have cost. This change will also hopefully keep pkillers from cabbing off planets so much.

The HM quest has just opened. It is a brand new quest, somewhat harder than the previous one and special emphasis has been put to avoid any kind of cheating while doing the quest. The requirements for doing the quest will remain the same. Now the quest is running and operational, more work will be put to the HM skills that have not been coded yet.

Droids are undergoing changes and modifications. Each droid type will be made different, so for different tasks, different droids will be needed. The goal is to make droids more an integral part of playing the game instead of being just laborers to carry things.

Races are undergoing changes as well. Some old race skills, such as Defels' drain and Jawas' dodge will be replaced with new skills, claw and scavenge. This in an attempt to diversify race skills more and make each race even more unique. This includes changing skills that many races have, such as detect, to work slightly differently for each race.

New ships are being coded. Kwenn space will be the first to introduce two brand new ships, Assault Frigate and Ithorian Herd Ship. Work is also done on other freighter type ships.

Most of the Jedi guild will be recoded sometime in the future, when our Head of Jedi coder gets his RL in order :) Work on fixing and modifying the current skills will probably be done before that as well. But the future changes for Jedi include separating jedi alignment from the normal team alignment, thus allowing neutral players to become Jedi as well, for example.

The PK arena is in the last stages of testing and has been successful used by many of the players. Hopefully sometime in the future a similar type pk space can be added as well, but this is not certain yet.

There has been talk of making a sort of a simulator for newbies, where they could more easily access the newbie areas on different planets and thus making starting at the mud easier as well.

There has also been talk of coding subguilds and race specialists, but due to the low number of active coders, especially on summer time, these plans have been postponed until now and no further details are available yet.

It is now possible to advance past level 19 even without completing the HM quest. The cost for such is 2M credits. These players can party with HMs and get HM exp for HM monsters and can still do the HM quest at any point they wish. The only difference is that they don't get any HM skills.

New space pk code will be going in about a week. Details will be posted here once its done.