OSS v63 MS Private Server
A MapleStory v63 private server built on open-source foundations — a vanilla, pre-Big-Bang world expanded with a large amount of new maps and content. The game I wished they had kept making. Later, the sandbox where I had seven LLMs learn to play it.
What it is
A MapleStory v63 private server, built on open-source foundations and run in my homelab — not a stock server with the defaults left on, but rebuilt into the game I actually wanted: vanilla, pre-Big-Bang, then expanded. New maps and content, reworked equips and progression, a retuned cash shop, and a great deal of balance tuning, all layered onto that classic world.
The reason
I quit MapleStory after Big Bang. The world I grew up in got flattened into something faster and, to me, hollow — it felt disingenuous. This server was me building the direction I wished the game had taken instead: keep the slow, deliberate, hand-made world, and grow it rather than reset it. A real part of the work was content creation — adding maps and areas the original never had, in the spirit of the old game.
I will be honest about the rest of it: most of the build was a long grind — bandaid-fixing an old client, tuning numbers until they felt right, and chasing bugs that bred more bugs. The reward was getting to stand in a world shaped the way I thought it should be.
Then I let the models play it
Once the server was stable it became a sandbox for a different experiment: seven LLMs playing on the live server at once — Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3, Gemini 3.1, Grok 4, Kimi K2, Qwen3, and Sonnet 3.7, each driving its own character. Rather than make them fight the real game client, I built a simplified, custom server-side client — a stripped-down interface that handed each model the game state and took its movement and combat actions directly. I pre-loaded the full context — maps, mob tables, progression — so the models could plan instead of grope blindly. The interesting work was the context engineering, not the agent loop.
The honest ending: seven frontier models grinding a 2D MMO is a beautiful, expensive way to learn that a dumb bot would have been far more effective. So I retired them into plain server-side grinding bots, looping a hunting ground forever with no inference required. Reach for the model where judgment matters, and a bot where it does not.
Status
Done and retired. The world stands; the bots still grind.