A Comprehensive List of General Purpose Virtual Worlds Online

The following is a Comprehensive List of General Purpose Virtual Worlds Online. “General purpose” meaning virtual worlds without any default game mechanic. This list is meant to be complete and exhaustive but omits VR-headset worlds. For that reasoning and other clarifications see the addendum.

Tilemap Town

Tilemap Town was launched in 2017 by NovaSquirrel¹ and initially developed in conjunction with elseways, pocketthemouse, marlyn-x86, and Sanqui.² Users of Tilemap Town navigate a grid of user created and user placed 16x16 pixel tiles, each of which represents an object, floor, or wall tile. The tiles are loaded from tilesets which are created and uploaded by users. A tileset is an image grid where each cell is its own image (a sprite). Tilesets were used in early video games because they provided a way to keep all sprites (individual graphics) for a current area in fast random access memory (RAM), eliminating the CPU expensive cost of retrieving each individual graphic as needed from slower storage.

The historical term for the final grid the player sees is a tilemap, hence the game title. It is a nod to the early technology the game uses for displaying graphics.

According to NovaSquirrel, Tilemap Town was based off an old virtual world named ‘Icon Ultima’. Tilemap Town is one of the less popular virtual worlds in this list, but the developer prefers it remain small and close-knit.

Website: tilemap.town

Pictorbit

After Manyland shut down during February of 2024, a woman with the pseudonym Rose developed a Manyland clone throughout 2024-2025 privately under the name Thingistan, and then made the clone public during 2026 as Pictorbit.

Pictorbit has reasonably chill players but some staff can be overbearing. Also, the staff has put significant effort into organizing community events at the user spawn location. Users cannot run their own servers and there are world state issues from aggressive multi-server caching (objects occasionally not unloading properly).

Website: pictorbit.com

Saltfree

Saltfree is the only other public Manyland clone currently online. It was launched in 2024 by a prior banned Manyland user named IsaaCool and his programmer friend Heiho. The community leaves much to be desired, let’s just leave it at that.

Saltfree has its own benefits. Unlike Pictorbit, users can easily download their own art and their server runs on a single home computer out of the administrator’s house (last time I checked). This keeps the game’s state stable, and doesn’t have the caching issue Pictorbit does. Like Pictorbit, users are unable to run their own servers.

Website: saltfree.antisa.lt

Spindizzy

Spindizzy is a social MUCK. It’s worth defining that first. Being a fan of both IRC and BBSs, or old bulletin board software only available via text clients via telnet or SSH, hearing about MUDs/MUCKs/and MUSHs was highly intriguing to me. They are like BBSs in that they retain some static signs of life even after people log off. And like IRC, they are partially built around casual, ephemeral text chat. By marrying both of these concepts, we get a virtual world system that is entirely text based, and you navigate the worlds much like early text adventure games. There really are no graphics. Typing ‘Look’ prints text of your surroundings. Then you interact with your surroundings via text. Each MUD world is a large series of rooms, and you can also find the exits of said rooms through aforementioned ’look’ command. You travel to adjacent rooms by entering their name.

Spindizzy is a unique MUCK in that it is primarily social oriented and not oriented toward any default game mechanic.

Telnet address: muck.spindizzy.org:7073 (Needs a separate Telnet program, with url and port entered manually)

Second Life

LindenWorld was founded in 2001 by Philip Rosedale as a private shooter game, but was then shortly renamed as Second Life: a 3D virtual world. It was eventually made public and got its first user as a general purpose virtual world in 2002.³ It is arguably the most popular general purpose virtual world. Today it has around 33,000 daily users.⁴

Second Life has been on my radar for decades but I never became a player for more than a few days. For one, primitive 3D, user-drawn graphics are very high triangle count often, due to its very high triangle cap for user uploaded objects. So you need a lot of GPU power to render everyone’s creations at once in a single space. That is a major limiting factor. That and Second Life fails to effectively communicate that the game is mostly optimized for NVIDIA GPUs. You can use AMD GPUs but it’s not an efficient experience. For years this interfaced Second Life clients poorly with open source operating systems, as they’ve had poor NVIDIA support only until recently.

Additionally, Second Life has always been the home of the ‘geekier’ side of nerds: not just furries, but a wide assortment of various other human-hybrid… things. After arriving and seeing a million different species of humans, it’s unclear exactly how each one prefers to be interacted with.

As alluded to in a prior article, mass user-created complex 3D objects in a single space often looks worse than more primitive, uniform 3D objects. It’s difficult for users to geometrically align complex 3D objects and as a result so many vital objects and buildings in Second Life look… broken for what they are trying to achieve. Missing pixels from poor alignment show through adjacent triangles of building wall seams. Will the roof just fall off? Jagged, sharp edges are everywhere. In the real world, you would probably just leave such a place for physical safety. I walked into Second Life a few times, had a short chat with a few residents, hung out in a few public spots and then left to never return again.

Website: secondlife.com

OpenSimulator

Open Simulator (also called OpenSim) was founded on January 29th, 2007 by Darren Guard. Programmer lbsa71 made a prototype Second Life clone server using C#, which was paired with a Second Life clone client which used the open source libsl library. The goal was to make an open source Second Life-like experience so OpenSim could be for 3D what the Apache web software was for 2D webpages. The programmer sdague worked to change the programs database from DB4o to SQLite. IBM became involved in its development when sdague collaborated with Justin Casey and Dirk Huseman to set up a bugfix system for IBM employees testing the software out.⁵

While Second Life is the sole owner of its closed sources servers, OpenSimulator’s open source servers can be hosted by anyone. An OpenSim grid is a collection of one of more OpenSim servers that manages a single virtual world with multiple regions.⁶ Each grid has its own unique assets and asset IDs.⁷ If a server operators grid is Hypergrid enable, its users can teleport to each Hypergrid enabled OpenSim grids,⁶ an impressive design architecture that feels necessary for any future virtual worlds project, to ease the financial burden of scaling, and let communities control their own terms while maintaining a broader environment.
A user named Garth created OpenSim’s largest grid named OSGrid,⁵ but there are also dozens of other grids to connect to.

It’s basically the Mastodon to Second Life’s Twitter/X.

Website: opensimulator.org (May take a while to load)

List of OpenSim Grids OpenSim Wiki Grid List

ActiveWorlds

Like Second Life and MUDs, ActiveWorlds is considered an internet staple, described by fellow Virtual Worlds documentarian Ryan Schultz as a “granddaddy” of virtual worlds. Active Worlds was popular long before my time on the web.

Launched during 1995 nearly 8 years before Second Life, ActiveWorlds has been online for over 30 years. Also, like Manyland and Second Life, the assets are user generated. Unlike Second Life and Manyland, user generated objects were limited to a set of pre-defined building blocks advertised on each world. This gave each world a coherent style. Due to its relative obscurity on the modern internet, Youtuber ‘Straszfilms’ (Chris Hornyak) calls it ‘Second Life for hipsters’. As Straszfilms further explains, the difficulty of creating 3D graphics in the 90s solidified the influence of a single 3D asset creator named Circle of Fire Studios, which left a permanent aesthetic mark on ActiveWorlds. Circle of Fire Studios eventually took control of ActiveWorlds as a whole, but with a different database, involving a loss of prior worlds for the entire community.

ActiveWorlds is also increasingly becoming paywalled. It also has a long history of monetization attempts. As of this year, having the right to build in the world costs real money, and features like Telegrams are also being put under a paywall.

Website: activeworlds.com

DeltaWorlds

As a response to the issues with ActiveWorlds, the Reddit community forum for ActiveWorlds recommends a free but also closed-source alternative called DeltaWorlds.

DeltaWorlds seeks to be a clone of ActiveWorlds, with a focus on historically preserving the oldest ActiveWorlds world named AlphaWorld, along with a few other historically notable worlds. The DeltaWorlds maintainers are increasingly dissatisfied with their custom client. On April 7th of this year a moderator of DeltaWorlds announced their intention to switch to Second Life’s client.

You can see my prior, detailed article on DeltaWorlds here.

Website: deltaworlds.com

Virtual Paradise

Virtual Paradise began development in the early 2000s. While it bore influence from ActiveWorlds, it was coded from scratch and doesn’t use an ActiveWorlds client. It was created and is still run by a former ActiveWorld user⁸ named Edwin Rijkee, who calls himself the “benevolent dictator for life” of the software. Out of all 3 ActiveWorlds influenced virtual worlds, It’s the only one with a native Linux client. Virtual Paradise itself is still under active development, including multiple fixes and new features recently.

VirtualParadise initially attracted users from then ActiveWorlds’ ‘AWTeen’ world, but they are not teenagers anymore.

Website: virtualparadise.org

Decentraland

Decentraland is a heavily monetized virtual world. While it has all the components of a general purpose virtual world, they are just deprioritized in favor of a ‘custom skin’ monetization scheme which reminds me of those found in low-quality phone games. Like most of the prior virtual worlds, users can individually create the assets within the overall world, but unlike prior virtual worlds, avatar customization comes with a steep publishing fee.

It was first launched in 2017 as a place to simply claim land and then transitioned in a 3D virtual world over time. Clothing and accessories now serve as an elaborate hook to get users to purchase and exchange items from an NFT marketplace. This seems to be the main current focus of the game despite its potential use as a general purpose virtual world. Clicking on any individual user tells you what NFTs they own before any personality traits.

Decentraland is geared toward the cryptocurrency community, but the sizeable cryptocurrency community seems to have largely declined using Decentraland in favor of speculating on its associated cryptocurrency called ‘MANA’. MANA, as I type has a 150 million dollar market cap. Contrast that to the in-game population, which seems low in comparison, about 500 logged people in at a time.

Despite the ability to create user graphics, the game has fallen victim to one of the more annoying features of popular cryptocurrency online forums: non-stop self-advertisement, the world feels mostly a world of billboards for external services or inactive in-game events. Popular cryptocurrency vlogger Cryptos R’ Us once did a popular liveplay of the game, and was shown as confused about immediately being confronted with worlds whose main purpose was just to house signs and billboards, several of which he clicked without any reaction from the game engine.

CoinDesk reported that the virtual world had a few thousand daily active users per day, with some aggregators misreading daily active users as in the dozens.⁹

Website: decentraland.org

Pixadom

Pixadom was founded during 2023 and is explicitly commercial; users receive emails to purchase objects using gems, which can in turn be purchased with dollars. It also has a generally commercial feel to it, like the now defunct ‘Relm’ virtual world company.

Pixadom is highly regimented into only a few distinct areas. Additionally, appearing like a general purpose world, they’ve strayed from that by sneaking in game mechanics into at least one of the areas, and one that feels borderline predatory. For example, the community garden encourages a user to spend at least 5 literal screen time hours, continuously, on observance and mini-games to retain a plant they watered, or else it dies (LMAO). Although, being one of the few virtual worlds without an overarching objective, and with a relaxing 2D style, I admire what Pixadom is attempting aesthetically. While a bit too busy with animations, it has a certain aesthetic charm.

There is basically no community, it is too new to have had one emerge.

Website: pixadom.com

There.com

There.com was launched in 1998,¹⁰ before Second Life, and took the approach of pre-built assets and little creativity, whereas Second Life let the users create their own worlds. Both were early competitors, with Second Life launching only a few years later. There.com raised tens of millions over its first few years for business operation.¹⁰ While both there.com and Second Life offered an alternative to the real-world, few users wanted to remain on platforms like there.com which was constantly built around monetization schemes.

At the beginning, even basic item collection in there.com involved some exchange of real world money for their virtual currency to buy the asset. There.com advertised an early version of ‘digital ownership’ through real-world payment before NFTs did. They marketed that in-game ownership of goods purchased with real money was just as “real” as meatspace items purchased with money. As the world experience was largely determined by the developers, users ultimately preferred Second Life and similar games which allowed for more user freedom in item creation, until there.com was basically a ghost town.

There.com has exchanged ownership multiple times but is still running. It shut down during 2010,¹⁰ but was relaunched during 2012 with a higher age limit to participate, only allowing those over 18 to participate.¹¹

Website: there.com

Home Legacy

Home Legacy, previously Atom Republic, is partially centered around a literal theme park. Like There.com the developers largely determine the user experience and it is not geared toward user asset creation. The recent reviews on Steam are highly negative, panning the game’s obsession with monetization. Other “theme park” feeling virtual worlds include Habbo Hotel and Avakin Life.

Website: Steam link

WorkAdventure

WorkAdventure was founded during 2020 by Gregory Rocher.¹²

Work is what people do most of the day, so I consider it ‘general purpose’. Users can host their own servers, the entire thing appears to be open source, which is nice and unique among work virtual worlds of past.

WorkAdventure is probably the easiest-to-use virtual work world I’ve found, but also not particularly enjoyable. Not because of the work facilitation, but because entering someone’s private space triggers their webcam, meaning just walking near someone feels like harassment. They get a loud ‘DING’ and all of a sudden their meatspace body is broadcast without warning. A bit unthoughtful to those of us who need a bit of warning, primping, and posture before being broadcast. The idea of ensuring shared project spaces in a metaverse is a fabulous idea though. And I would personally prefer these project spaces involve non-ephemeral chats tied to each plot of land, rather than ephemeral webcam chats that launch on mutual avatar proximity. That way, you can move around while describing your project, utilize the actual virtual world to describe your project, or maybe just pace while working. Pacing helps a lot with thinking!

It’s possible WorkAdventure allows configuration to enable other modes of work communication, but they aren’t immediately obvious. I left the main WorkAdventure server rather quickly after feeling a bit embarrassed. They start you out in their main, virtual corporate office, which is immediately stressful to someone who likes to ease into annoying any over-controlling admins over a period of 1-2 years.

Website: workadventu.re

After the Manyland virtual world went offline in 2024, I went searching for replacements, and found more than I was looking for.

I found that prior attempts to index general purpose virtual worlds were incomplete and also now outdated. This, and Manyland going offline, as mentioned prior, is what primarily drove me to make the list.

The list omits worlds built for VR headsets and where the non-VR desktop experience, if any, is a frustrating afterthought. I really don’t think more than a tiny fraction of the US population is going to purchase VR goggles anytime soon, because we still haven’t fixed the headache issue with them for over 30 years. But nearly everyone has a computer with an operating system that can run the programs in the list.

The list is meant to be exhaustive and complete rather than a list of things-I’ve-used-recently.

Contact

Know of a general purpose virtual world I missed? Feel free to contact me, and I’ll add it to this page.