Solar Eclipse (SE) is a full-featured mud that has a lot of potentials. It boasts of 20+ races, some dozen classes, and a Remort system that allows the player to restart at level 1 with a new race/class and keep some of the uber stat.

The world of SE is a collection of areas based on various themes and popular video games at the time, that the implementers have managed to mash together over the years. Some are just simple hack-n-slash, kill-rinse-repeat type of leveling up areas, some are quite interactive (through the use of scripts) and filled with challenging puzzles, enemies and great rewards.

After picking your race and class, the player is led through a very well written newbie school. It really does a fantastic job ntroducing the mechanics of the mud. After graduation from newbie school, player is then introduced to the Adventurer's Guild, hich sends them on quests to showcase some of the features of the mud. I will list some of them as examples: 1) mine three different types of material to create a device to breath underwater 2) clear out pests in an abandoned mansion; this one is quite fun as some of the pests are hidden and require some interaction with the area to get them out. There is also a countdown of how many are left to clear as each puzzle is solved. 3) make flip-flops in a factory...this shows a feature of the mud where you can combine items to create new ones

so on and so forth. These quests are really fun and I which there were more interactive things like this on the mud.

There is an questing system that is for better or worse, a big part of the game. It sends the player to various types of quests determined by chance and level. Quest points are gained by completing these quests. It is certainly not required, since on the whole the difficulty of the mud is quite low. Questing offers some good prizes in the form of items called sigils. Sigils are pretty useful, they can attach to a piece of equipment and apply stats on top of the existing stats, and quest rewards sigils generally have some more unique features such as a weapon that changes damage type based on the vulnerability of the mob, pretty useful. The bad thing about questing is that it becomes too big a part of the game and it takes away from the other parts. In fact there are a lot of players just sit at the auto-questor waiting for the next quest to be available (it has a wait time of 10 minutes or so in between quests)

There are other fun things like mining and capture which also are really fun and will eat up a lot of time. With mining you can ine different materials and create equipment with various attributes based on the materials. Capture seems to be based on the FFX idea, where a boss can be challenged upon the completion of defeating a certain types and numbers of mobs in an area.

The classes are pretty fleshed-out; although some (in particular monk and necromancer) are a lot more fleshed-out than others. Thief especially is extremely under-whelming. Nonetheless the classes have unique features and are all fun to play. The variety of the skills in combination of the Remort system makes SE have a lot of replayability.

Races have different stat advantages, such as giant having more Strength, naturally. Pixies have in-born fly, parthans (cats) having 50% bonus on hand-to-hand and claws. Pretty diverse stuff, although like the classes, a few of the races aren't that good.

Players on SE are generally friendly and some are even quite chatty. I have not met many unhelpful players during all of my time playing on it. The current immortal staff are really friendly (and more laid back than ever).

At one time there were a lot of clans activiiy (hence PK) going on, however, the mud went down sometime ago and the player count has suffered a lot as a result. It can really use a lot of players.

In closing I think SE is a mud with many good features, and has the potential to be great with more congruent areas and more players. Either way I have really enjoyed playing this mud.