History

TL;DR: DreamLand descends from DikuMUD through Merc, ROM and Anatolia, was forked in 1998, went dark for about five years and came back on 2018-04-24. Fenia, its scripting language, began as a mob-program language for another Kyiv MUD and was rewritten for DreamLand. The in-game Five Epochs are a story, and they line up with real eras of the project. Use when: you want to know where the code, the language and the lore come from, you write about the project, or you look for the old Russian wiki. Source of truth: dreamland_code/licenses/* (lineage and credits), dreamland_world/helps/anatolia.xml (help 80, the Epochs), git history of the repos (first-commit dates), the in-game book "Grammar of the Fenia language" (origin of Fenia, archived in dreamland_code/docs/archive/wiki-ru) Verified: 2026-11-02 against dreamland_code 88da8302, dreamland_world 43880467, dreamland_areas 6a04168, mudjs 990bf6d. Items marked (archive) come from the in-game change and news archive and the project's own notes, and are not checkable in the repos.

Lineage

DreamLand is a DikuMUD derivative, and the game says so in its own creation myth (help 80, help dreamland history): the world of Diku was made on Earth, hundreds of ROM and Anatolia worlds grew from it, and the two supreme gods made Thera "as a mirror reflection of the Anatolia worlds". The code lineage is the real one:

Step	Years	Evidence
DikuMUD	1990 to 1991	licenses/DikuMud.license.txt
Merc	2.1 released 1993	licenses/Merc.license.txt
ROM	2.4	licenses/ROM.credits.txt, ROM.license.txt
Anatolia	started September 1996 on ROM 2.4, Anatolia II in June 1997	licenses/Anatolia.credits.txt
DreamLand 2.0	1998 to 2003	licenses/DreamLand2.0.credits.txt
DreamLand 3.0	2003 to 2012	licenses/DreamLand3.0.credits.txt
DreamLand 4.0	2018 and on	licenses/DreamLand4.0.credits.txt

The credits files hold the full lists of authors. The 3.0 credits already name Fenia coders and thank code from other MUDs (Forgotten Dungeon, Shades of Gray, Anatolia 3.0, DalekenMUD, Labyrinth). The engine today is GPL-3.0 (LICENSE), with the older licenses kept next to it.

The Anatolia heritage is also why the English text of many older areas is the Anatolia original, which the translation work treats as canonical.

Fenia

Fenia is the in-house scripting language that runs almost all active game mechanics. Its own story, as told by the in-game book that describes the language (archived text in the RU wiki archive):

1. The first version was written in plain ANSI C as a mob-program language for Forgotten Dungeon, a Kyiv MUD. It was never finished.
2. In a year of the 2000s (the book prints "200?") a working version was defended as a diploma project at Odessa National University, on the topic "a language for modelling the behaviour of objects".
3. Many years and many rewrites later it was attached to DreamLand with almost no loss of function.
4. The old and the new Fenia share no code. The principles and the syntax stayed.

The current implementation is C++ in src/fenia of dreamland_code, with the grammar in parse.y++ and the scanner in scan.l++. It is event-oriented, untyped, threaded and looks like JavaScript. Where to read next: Fenia, Fenia-Grammar.

The Five Epochs and real time

help dreamland history tells the history of Thera in five Epochs. The text is lore, and it is also a careful retelling of the real project. This table maps one onto the other. Dates marked (archive) come from the change and news archive, which starts on 2001-10-10.

Epoch	What the story says	Real years
Before the First	Earth, Diku, Merc, ROM and Anatolia, then Thera as a mirror of Anatolia.	1990 to 1998. DreamLand forks Anatolia in 1998.
First	A young world full of Chaos. The first Immortals, the first heroes. Strangers from the Forgotten Dungeon arrive. Almost no chronicles survive.	1998 to about 2000. "Almost no chronicles" is literal: the archive starts in October 2001. Forgotten Dungeon is a real neighbouring MUD whose players came over (archive).
Second	The Great Wars. Legendary heroes and gods. Heroes carry skills across lives (rebirth). The Universals arrive and the Great Cataclysm wipes Thera.	About 2000 to 2001. The era of clan wars. The library holds player stories from 2000 and 2001. The Cataclysm is a player wipe, before November 2001 (archive).
Third	The Universals break the balance. Heroes become gods, old gods change names, a young satyress joins the pantheon.	Late 2001 to 2003 (archive).
Fourth	The page is torn out. A withering, then a revival.	2003 to 2018. A boom in 2003 to 2005, a slow fade after, and a server that was down for about five years. The torn page is the gap (archive).
Fifth	Midgaard is the centre of civilisation, politics are settled, the arcs are driven by players.	2018-04-24 until now.

The Fifth Epoch has no section of its own in the in-game text yet, and the Fourth is still torn. Writing them is open lore work.

What 2018 and after looked like

• The server came back on 2018-04-24 after the long break.
• The first web client commit is dated 2018-04-25 (mudjs). The first commit in the engine repository is dated 2018-08-02, in the world config repository 2018-07-27. The recorded history of the code starts there.
• The Mudlet package started in September 2018.
• The history of the area repository starts in February 2020, of the private Fenia scripts in February 2021, and of the public Fenia library in January 2024.
• Ukrainian and English text appears in the repositories from October 2024. The project's own account is that for some 25 years before that the game spoke only Russian. Today every room, mob, item, skill and help article has English and Ukrainian text, Russian stays for the old players, and all three languages share one world.
• The current web client (React and Vite, graph map, settings, chat frames) went to production in September 2026 (project notes), see Client-Web-Development.

The old Russian wiki

Until November 2026 this wiki was mostly Russian, with pages from 2021 and earlier. It was frozen as it stood and kept:

• Repository dreamland_code, folder docs/archive/wiki-ru on the default branch: https://github.com/dreamland-mud/dreamland_code/tree/master/docs/archive/wiki-ru.
• The same snapshot as the git tag ru-archive-2026-11 in the wiki repositories of dreamland_code and mudjs.

Folder readme/ there keeps the Russian README files of dreamland_code, mudjs and the Mudlet package. The chat-log tutorials on Fenia (Fenia:-Tutorials) are only in the archive. Their facts were moved into the Fenia pages. Treat the archive as history, many pages are stale.

See also

• Home
• World-Canon
• Fenia
• Repositories