Stendhal: a browser-playable open source MMORPG with a classic Java client

One game, four ways to reach it

Stendhal is described as a fun, friendly and free multiplayer online adventure game with an old school feel, and the project calls it a fully fledged multiplayer online adventures game that is completely open source, client, server and everything.

What is unusual is the number of ways in. There is a web browser client that works on desktop or mobile with JavaScript support, where you click a play now button to create or log in to your account. There is a progressive web app, so visiting the site on a phone and accepting the install prompt gives you a standalone app. There is a dedicated Android application available from F-Droid or downloaded from the project site. And there is the classic desktop client, which is a Java application.

The range spans from a browser tab to a native app, and the reasoning behind it is practical rather than decorative. Someone evaluating the game on a phone should not have to install anything to find out whether they like it.

The world itself is described as new, rich and expanding, with towns, buildings, plains, caves and dungeons to explore. You meet NPCs and acquire tasks and quests for experience, and your character develops with each level up, becoming stronger. Money buys new items and lets you improve armour and weapons, and the README addresses the combat appetite directly, telling the blood thirsty to roam the world in search of evil monsters.

The progression is a classic role-playing loop, and the emphasis on social standing as something you develop alongside your character is the part that distinguishes it from a solo questing game. The screenshots in the README point at a magic tower, an achievements list and a cocktail bar, which is a decent summary of what a MMO town is made of.

The classic client is one Java command

The classic desktop client is the traditional way to play, and the setup is deliberately small.

You download the package from the project site, and you need Java. The README points at the Microsoft download page for Windows and notes that Java is included in most Linux distributions, and that both Oracle Java and OpenJDK are supported.

There are two ways to launch it. You can double click on stendhal-starter.jar and the client runs, or you can run it from the command line in the stendhal folder:

java -jar stendhal-starter.jar

A starter jar is a familiar pattern for Java desktop applications, since it points at the real dependencies rather than bundling them, and the alternative of double clicking means the game can be launched by someone who has never opened a terminal.

Help is built into the client itself, through the menu icons in the upper right hand side of the game screen, and there is also a manual on the project wiki. Having documentation reachable from inside the running game matters more than it sounds for an MMORPG, because a new player meets game vocabulary in the first ten minutes and the alternative to looking something up is asking another player.

The client is the older part of the project in every sense. The legal section dates the copyright of the original work to 2005 through 2008 in the name of Miguel Angel Blanch Lardin and others, and the Arianne Project itself from 2006 to 2026, so the game predates most of what it is competing with for attention.

Hosting your own server is a documented path, not a hack

The development environment section links four wiki pages, and one of them is the one that matters most for the project's character: hosting a Stendhal Server.

That link says the project expects people to run their own worlds. Arianne is a community project rather than a single commercial operation, and the presence of a documented server hosting guide alongside the client build guides means the intended model is a project that runs its own server with its own rules, its own content and its own community, rather than a single world everyone joins.

The other three links are the ordinary ones for a Java project of this size: Stendhal in Eclipse, building Stendhal, and building the Android WebView client. The last one is interesting because it names the technology, a WebView wrapper, which is how the Android app is built around the web client rather than being a separate native implementation.

The repository layout supports the picture. There is src/ for the source, app/ for the server application, data/ for game content, libs/ for bundled libraries, tests/, buildtools/, doc/ and bin/. The build is Ant, with build.xml and build.ant.properties at the root, which is an older choice than Gradle and reflects the project's age. There is also a package.json for the web client, with esbuild, showdown, typedoc and typescript in the devDependencies, and its own test script.

The primary language of the repository is Java, the topics are game, game-server, java, mmorpg and rpg, and the last push was on 2026-07-12 with the repository not archived. There are no GitHub releases, so the versioned artifacts live on the project site and the wiki rather than in the repository's release list.

The licences differ per client, and that is a deliberate split

The legal section is unusually precise, and it is worth reading closely if you are thinking about running a server, forking the code or redistributing a client.

Stendhal is free software that you can redistribute and modify under stated terms, and the terms differ by component. The server, the Java client and the Android client are under the GNU General Public License 2 or later. The web client and the native client are under the GNU Affero General Public License 3 or later, with the definition of System libraries extended to include authentication providers and software distribution platforms. The nativehelper extensions are under the GNU Lesser General Public License 3 or later.

So there is no single licence for the project. The distinction follows a coherent logic even if it is unusual. The GPL components are the ones that make up the game itself, while the AGPL covers the clients, and the AGPL network clause matters for the web client specifically, since it is served to browsers rather than distributed to users. The extension of the System libraries definition to include authentication providers and software distribution platforms is a specific carve-out that appears to be about using a hosted login or store with the client, and it is the sort of wording that is written because a real deployment needed it.

The LGPL on the nativehelper extensions is the usual choice for a component meant to be linked rather than incorporated.

There is also the standard warranty disclaimer, with the program distributed in the hope that it will be useful but without any warranty, and the pointers to the licence files, one at the root and one for the JavaScript sources under src/js.

The copyright lines are two, and both are historical: the original work from 2005 to 2008 in the name of Miguel Angel Blanch Lardin and others, and the Arianne Project from 2006 to 2026. A contributors list is linked as well.

A community project with a very long tail of contributors

The project is called Stendhal, but the repository belongs to the Arianne Project, and the README points at arianne-project.org as the homepage with the game itself hosted on stendhalgame.org.

The split matters for how you read the rest. Arianne is the umbrella, and Stendhal is its flagship game. The presence of the contributor list at doc/contributors.md, with a mail contact at arianne-general, and a general contact for the game, is what a volunteer project looks like from the outside.

The age of the project is the other thing that explains the shape of the software. A web client running in a browser, a progressive web app, a Java desktop client and an Android application are four codebases to keep in step, and only one of them, the Java one, is the original. The web client is what new players are most likely to use, and it is the one under the AGPL.

For anyone deciding whether to spend an evening on it, the practical summary is short. There is a browser client that needs no install, a world with quests, levels, items and a social hierarchy you can climb, and a project that is still being worked on as of July 2026. The aesthetic is deliberately dated, and the README's own framing, an old school feel, is a selling point to the audience it is written for rather than a defect.

The one thing the README does not explain is the size and activity of the live world, which is the fact that decides whether a multiplayer game is worth your time. That is something you can only find out by playing, and the free web client makes the experiment cheap.

Editorial conclusion

Stendhal is worth playing if you want a text-and-tile MMORPG that runs in a browser tab with no installer and no subscription, because the web client and the progressive web app mean you can play on a phone from a link, and the fact that the server is in the same repository means a community can run their own world with its own rules. It is the wrong tool if you want modern graphics or a large player base, since the appeal is explicitly an old school feel and the emphasis is on the world, the quests and the social standing rather than on spectacle. Before you commit time to it, verify three things yourself: that the client you are using matches the server version, since the browser, Java and Android clients are released separately from the server, that you read the licence terms for the specific client you install, because the server and Java client are GPL while the web and native clients are AGPL with an extended definition of system libraries, and that you understand what the game does with the account, since you create an account to play and the project runs on volunteer infrastructure.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. arianne/stendhal on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: GPL-2.0
4. Project website
5. README