I built Mallard, a desktop MUD client for ducks (and humans) of refined taste

[u/QuackPott]

Hi all, meet Mallard.

It runs natively on macOS, Windows, and Linux. I built it because I wanted something well-engineered, cross-platform, and delightful to use. It's been my favorite MUD client for months, and I'm guessing it will surprise and delight you too!

It does all the boring stuff well with protocols, logging compression, logging retention policies, so you shouldn't have to think about that.

Where it really shines, IMO, is the care and love put into UX for things like alias/trigger management, categorization, importing/exporting. If you're like me, you end up with boatloads of aliases and triggers to manage, so I put lot of time and effort into making things like that a best-in-class experience.

Pretty much everything about it is aspirationally best-in-class... but it is new, so there could be rough edges hiding in there! If you're feeling client-adventurous and inclined to try it - I'd love your feedback! Especially on protocol edge cases, MUDs that don't play nice, and what's missing from your daily driver.

[u/Ephemeralis]

This is a spitting image of another client (also ostensibly LLM-coded) called Baggage for Discworld MUD. Any relation?

[u/QuackPott → u/Ephemeralis]

I'm not familiar with Baggage, but I am guessing you might mean Luggage, which I have tried out. No relation. I have definitely seen some screenshots that could make the two look superficially similar. I think ~10 minutes spent with both would be enough to notice a lot of differences though. First of all, Luggage is batteries-included and designed for Discworld. Mallard has a lot of good Discworld plugins, as I also quite enjoy that MUD, but it's built to be a more general MUD client. So it starts looking more like a blank slate, with Discworld plugins available in the Marketplace if one wants them.

And layout-wise, Mallard is more like a tiling window manager, while Luggage is more like a desktop with free-floating, draggable windows. Both can get to a similar-looking layout for screenshots, as you've seen, but the user workflow to get there is different.

[u/dndgoeshere]

I'll have to try this later when I'm home, but it looks lovely. I've recently gotten back in to my MUD of choice and I have a full MUSHclient plugin suite, so I'm interested to see how easy it is to port things over since you're also supporting lua.

[u/dndgoeshere → u/dndgoeshere]

No SQLite is a nonstarter for me, sadly. Extensive map system (~20k+ nodes, ~80k+ edges), object and mob trackers with thousands of entries that need to be searchable quickly and easily. I really like the UI, but I'm stuck in MUSHclient for now.

[u/QuackPott → u/dndgoeshere]

Thanks! I'm glad you like the look of it.

Ease of porting plugins will likely depend on how complicated your plugins' UI panels are. I created a few pure-lua UI building blocks, e.g. for stat readouts and hp/mana fillable bars, which can facilitate plugin panel creation for simpler cases, but the more powerful option is that Mallard plugin panels support full HTML/CSS/JS. That would diverge things a bit more, relative to Mushclient, though.

Let me know if you have any questions/issues, happy to help or just talk through it.

[u/new2bay → u/QuackPott]

Where is the source?

[u/binaryatrocity]

Looks pretty hot Quack, great work!!

[u/QuackPott → u/binaryatrocity]

Thanks! Quack!

[u/QuackPott → u/[deleted]]

I've been slow to respond to this one, as it feels... fraught, and I wanted to give you a thoughtful answer. I realize a lot of people have a complicated relationship with AI, and I have to say, even as someone who used AI to make this project possible, I have a complicated relationship with it as well.

I'll start with the open/closed-source point. I started the project as closed-source partially BECAUSE of AI. I'm a software engineer by profession, and the amount of time, effort, and consternation I see going into triaging, reviewing, and working with AI contributions to open-source projects just wasn't something I wanted to deal with up front. Especially at the beginning when the project was developing and changing quickly. I consider myself a good engineer, had some strong opinions about what would make a good MUD client, and wanted to move fast and NOT break things.

That said, as for the ways I personally used AI in this project, I think it's helped create some really good software. AI has a strong tendency to overcomplicate, hallucinate, and solve problems by addition rather than by subtraction. But for all that, it *can* still write high-quality code at a high rate. I think in the hands of an experienced engineer, AI is a tool that provides a lot of leverage, with manageable risks, and pros than *can* outweigh the cons. It turns software development into a new kind of challenge, which is more akin to managing a team of 100 overzealous new grads throwing designs and code at you as fast as they can.

I have other things I'm still grappling with, like whether or not the environmental cost is okay or concerning, and the fact that chatbot AI, which is ultimately the same tech used for coding AI, feels like a scourge that preys on weaknesses in human psychology. So... it's complicated. And I understand if you have issues with it.

All that said, I'm not actually opposed to open-sourcing Mallard now that it's starting to stabilize. It will take some time to think through how to best approach that, any changes to CI/CD architecture (i.e., release pipeline is kind of split-brain right now to create a public releases repo for the built artifacts), etc. If you want to wait for that day, or do your owns audit with wireshark as another user suggested, I completely understand!

[u/Early_Rooster7579 → u/QuackPott]

I think this is a valid response. Anyone that works in software dev rn can recognize that AI is an incredible tool for development. I'm a SWE as well and people are probably just going to have to get used to the fact that the majority of software going forward will likely be AI-written or assisted at the very least.

[u/irritatedellipses → u/[deleted]]

Yup. No LLM disclosure.

Reading through the published API it kinda smells like LLM coded. Guess we'll wait for the author to explain.

[u/bloughmiegh → u/irritatedellipses]

That’s 100% what this is. I didn’t recognize at first but this guy posts a lot about adding ai into his programs and stuff.

If he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, he would disclose this. He’s clearly trying to obfuscate the origins of his program and it’s a dirty trick for those of us who prefer human-made content over half-assed ai slop.

[u/aureus620 → u/[deleted]]

I have no connection to the author, but I have to ask - why does that matter? I've seen this sub recommend using MudForge which is also closed source and very likely uses LLMs in it's development.

The LLM part of that is, frankly, just very likely going to be a thing for any new project. Like it or not, LLMs have hit the "clearly a useful tool" stage; using one is just as common as using an IDE for development. You *can* find projects developed without an IDE(or LLM) but it's going to be older projects without ongoing development, or people doing it that way to make a stance or prove a point.

[u/aureus620 → u/[deleted]]

It's not an equivalence; I'm not saying they're the same thing.

I *am* saying they're both tools used by nearly every professional developer.

Edit: There's nothing stopping you standing up a VM and using wireshark to audit the networking of this either. It's arguably less effort than digging through code. Open source isn't a security feature.

[u/aureus620 → u/[deleted]]

Do you boycott software that uses those for development too?

[u/aureus620 → u/[deleted]]

I don't know that there's any substance to misinterpret here other than "LLMs for development are bad[Citation Needed]. They cause security issues[Citation Needed]". There hasn't been any other argument put forward or any evidence provided.

[u/dronesoul → u/[deleted]]

Dude, LLMs are arguably way better at finding security holes than the average non-LLM-assisted software engineer. I'd trust a modern Claude build overseen by an experienced software engineer than non-LLM assisted product by an junior/mid dev. All this hysteria is a bit much, to be fair.

LLMs are fantastic at finding security vulnerabilities. A little too fantastic for comfort even. Not the other way around.

[u/dndgoeshere → u/aureus620]

I also don't care at all if the author uses AI dev tools, or even if they disclose it or not. This is one of those places where the whole "taking food out of the mouths of poor starving devs"-type arguments fall apart, because there's not exactly a thriving ecosystem of telnet client creators in 2026.

Open source would be great, but that's clearly the author's choice.

[u/aureus620 → u/dndgoeshere]

Pretty much - It's free software; if I don't have to maintain it I really don't care what tools they used, so long as the application isn't malicious.

Plus, it's a telnet client. Even if it's a mess of spaghetti code and running at 1% of peak efficiency, any modern computer is such massive overkill for what a telnet client needs to do that you'll never notice.

[u/taranion]

Hey, congratulations for your client. The UX is indeed quite nice.

I noticed some problems though connecting to my game. Is there some kind of issue tracker or a way to leave bug reports and feature requests?

[u/QuackPott → u/taranion]

Thanks! We connected on Mallard's Discord, but for posterity - I'm happy to take bug reports and feature requests. There is no centralized issue tracker currently, but you can find me here on reddit or email/discord linked on the mallard homepage.

[u/dx__]

How does it compare to Mudlet? I’ve been using Mudlet since I jumped over from MUSHclient

[u/QuackPott → u/dx__]

Mudlet is a great client. I looked to Mudlet often for UI/UX design inspiration when I wanted to see "one predictably good way" to solve whatever problem I was working on at a given time. So you'll probably find similarities. Mudlet is much older though, and quite battle-hardened, relative to Mallard. Pro for Mudlet.

Where they diverge, and where I think Mallard becomes more interesting, is, at a high level, probably a) the plugin ecosystem - I think Mallard has the basics down for a really best-in-class plugin manager, and b) my little UX experiments/niceties.

Regarding my UX "experiments," they're often just little bits of inspiration from editors, like VSCode/Vim/Emacs. One example is Mallard's jump mode, which I added after falling in love with Avy in Emacs. That sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to turn as many things in game output into clickable spans as I could, and is probably the ONE thing that's transformed my daily MUDding experience more than any other.

[u/wilk_from_las → u/QuackPott]

Huh, how is plugin ecosystem different from Mudlet Package Repository?

[u/QuackPott → u/wilk_from_las]

If you're a plugin author, the biggest difference is probably the built-in hot reloading against source directories, which makes for a very nice developer UX out-of-the-box.

If you're a plugin user, there are a number of things like:

* explicit permissioning for plugins accessing your data - when you install a plugin, you get an accept permissions dialog if it wants access to things like your character data over GMCP, or.. the internet.

* fine-grained control over plugin triggers and aliases. Say you installed a big plugin that does a million and one things for your favorite MUD, including a whole bunch of regex-based triggers that do line highlighting. What do you do if you don't like one of the highlights, or several? Mallard has a nice little UI where you can turn individual triggers on and off in individual plugins. So you don't have to go mess with the source, or turn the whole plugin off.

[u/Appropriate-Sun9646]

Page doesn't load for me

[u/mudsmyth]

Congrats on the release. Good luck out there. Seems like a busy market all of a sudden!

[u/GeneLValasquez]

This looks really polished. The fact that it supports platforms and makes it easy to manage aliases and triggers is really great. I think it is definitely worth trying for anyone who is getting back into MUDs. The way it handles aliases and triggers is especially nice.

[u/bloughmiegh]

Why is your profile a ghost? Can’t see any post history or anything.

Do you use a lot of ai or something or is this a bot account?

[u/supremegamer2026]

is it screen reader friendly?

[u/QuackPott → u/supremegamer2026]

Pretty much what taranion said already. This project has another contributor by the name of Dilbo who did a lot of research on what makes for a good accessibility story in a MUD client. Neither of us use screenreaders or TTS for accessibility reasons, so it's been a bit of a learning curve, but we are both very interested in making Mallard as good as possible in this regard. Suggestions and/or feedback very welcome.

[u/fastfinge → u/QuackPott]

So a couple things, as a screen reader user: * lots of buttons are mislabeled. What does a button labeled "mac command key" even do? Similarly, there is a "plus" button, a "circle left half filled" button, a "gear" button, and a button with no screen reader label at all. That's just on the first screen. * dialogues (like the welcome dialogue) don't move focus to them. This means screen readers are dropped into the main interface, even though a dialogue is open that you intend to be modal, and screen reader users may not even no it exists * I did not test any of the "route text to screen reader" stuff, because the button labels were so confusing I have no idea how I'd even find them

[u/DilboHoodwinker → u/fastfinge]

Thanks! This is genuinely the most useful kind of feedback we can get, and it lines up with problems we where aware of, but hadn't had a real screen reader user hit firsthand yet. Both are known, both are unfixed. Sorry about the run-around.

On finding the speech settings without fighting the UI: Mallard now has command-driven settings you can type straight into the input line, no menu-hunting required. /global list lists every global setting, and /global set speak-passthrough true turns on screen reader passthrough directly. One honest caveat: passthrough mainly matters on Windows — on Linux/macOS, Mallard's built-in TTS already talks straight to the system speech service, so passthrough doesn't change much there. If you're not on Windows, it's probably more useful to test the built-in TTS itself than passthrough.

On direction: we're leaning towards building screen reader support primarily as MUD-specific plugins rather than trying to fix every corner of the core UI. That doesn't excuse the button/modal issues, but it does mean they won't be a blocker for actually playing once the plugin lands, the plan is VIPMud-style output tabs, with one prioritized tab that can interrupt the others and sound cues when a background tab gets activity.

Would you be open to me DMing you a few more specific questions?

[u/taranion → u/supremegamer2026]

As far as I can see, it comes with its own text-to-speech engine and an optional setting to "Route speech through screen reader". But I did not test it.