Dune is a MUD that has its origins way back in 1991. That means several generations of volunteer coders have come/gone over the years. Each has left their mark on Dune and that's part of what makes the game so special and expansive.

The flip-side is that when it comes time to update our game driver, or roll out large changes to the game logic, it's very difficult to test that nothing broke! Often the bugs we fix can be over 20 years old (legal to drink in most places!) and only trigger when a player happens to encounter them in-game.

The wheel of time grinds on and bitrot comes for all software! If we don't continue to keep the Dune game, the MUD driver software, and the host operating system updated and in shape for modern needs it will stop working eventually.

If we have to keep updating things, then we're inevitably going to break some stuff! That's going to be a crummy experience for you as a player. Nobody wants to have their sensitive mind disturbed by ripples in game reality.

Catching bugs on DevDune, our development copy of Dune, means that we can fix them before they impact your playing on the real copy of Dune. The faster we find the bugs after an update the easier they are to fix. The easier the bugs are to fix the more of them we can fix! That frees staff time for better jobs like building new areas and exciting game content.

Connect to DevDune:

If your MUD client was connecting to Dune on 6789, use 4242 instead. If you were using the secure port, 6788, then use port 4241 to connect to DevDune.

You can use your normal login/password. Nothing that happens on DevDune (character death, skill training, glevels, etc) will be persisted long-term, or affect your characters on “real Dune”. DevDune is an alternate universe.

You may find the data on DevDune is “stale”. We only take snapshots of “real Dune” every few weeks. This means things you've done on regular Dune (levels, skill training, tell/channel history, gexp, etc) may not be present on DevDune: it's like a time-machine back to whenever the last snapshot was made.

This is a tough question to answer because Dune is so big! In short: try everything you can think of! If anything seems weird (you get an error, text seems missing, a room has no exits, etc) then report a bug

If you want a list of things people have done that have helped find bugs in the past, here are some ideas:

1. Speak on channels (normal and guild) check everything (including history!) works.
2. Run around and kill monsters.
3. Use special gskills.
4. Kill other players in pk. Check pkrank, pkills, pklist and other assorted pk commands work.
5. Shop at shops. Try to buy gear, etc
6. Check your inventory looks correct.
7. Check that dying has typical consequences.

Be on the look out for the dreaded “Your sensitive mind notices a wrongness … ” messages. Those are always an indication a bug happened.

In general focusing on more obscure parts of the game, or older areas, can sometimes help uncover bugs as well.

Great! Please use the “bug” command in-game (on DevDune please) as soon as you notice the bug. It will report what room you were in at the time you made the report.

Try to include as much detail as possible so that a wizard can recreate the bug. The easier it is to recreate a bug the better and you might not be online by the time someone has a chance to look into it. Include commands you ran, directions you used to get around, what you expected to happen, what happened instead. Anything you can think of!

If you read this far and are engaged in helping find bugs on Dune or DevDune know that the staff really appreciates it! We couldn't do it without you.