Update

Time for my first bi-weekly update since launch.  As of this morning, 74 player accounts (not including me!) have been created.  Pretty good!  The server is very stable; only one bug has been encountered (and fixed).

I've made a whole bunch of minor tweaks to make the initial experience a little easier.  Players now start with a little bit of gold so they can buy equipment sooner.  XP bonuses for exploration have been increased, usually around 2x.

Right after launch I noticed areas filling up with lots and lots of items.  My item spawn/decay code needed to be reworked.  It looked fine when the server would start, but after running for a while, things would accumulate.  I missed this when developing, where I rarely have the server running for more than a few minutes at a time.  After a couple iterations, things are much better.

The game interface has gotten some updates.  First and most obviously, the screen size was increased by 5 lines, to 80x30.  All of the additional lines went into the chat window.  There's now a mini-map / maxi-chat mode, toggled using :minimap or the ` (back-tick, just below Escape on your keyboard), allowing a longer view of chat history.  The chat box now handles multi-line messages better, so your chats can be more wordy!  I've also gone through the game and expanded various descriptive messages to be longer and more detailed.  Here's a demo of the chat window updates:

The command prompt (what you get when you press : (colon) in-game) has better editing functionality and history.  When in command mode, press SHIFT+UP or SHIFT+DOWN (arrow keys) to move through your command history.  SHIFT+LEFT and SHIFT+RIGHT move the cursor left/right through the current command.  New text can be typed into the middle of a command, or deleted.  Here's a demo:

Why SHIFT+arrow?  Well, plain arrows are already taken.  Arrow keys are 'typeable' in the command prompt, and can be entered as arguments to commands.  I actually typed some right arrows by accident in the demo above :)  Arrow keys (without shift) are a shortcut for named directions, ie → is a shorthand for 'east', and ↖ is 'northwest'.  These make it super quick to make an attack: literally press 'a↖' to attack to the northwest (a is a hot-key for the ":attack" command).  Hot-keys are viewable with the :keys command.

After the launch, I submitted SWORD & HAMMER to a few MUD listing sites:

https://www.mudverse.com/game/596

https://game-scry.online/game/sword%20and%20hammer

These listing sites utilize a Telnet extension called MSSP (MUD Server Status Protocol) to poll the game server for information like uptime, active players, and various descriptive attributes.  Although my is browser-based instead of telnet, I went ahead and enabled a basic telnet port with MSSP so the listing sites can query this information.  The Game Scry site has an additional protocol called GSGP that provides similar information using HTTP/JSON.  However, they also include the ability to respond with leader board information, which I duly implemented.  It's pretty neat! Check out the leaderboard on the second link above.